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Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce.
(Guanzhong, 14th century, p. 1.)
Mark Blechner’s new, well put-together book The Mindbrain and Dreams, not covers areas not mentioned in his previous book, The Dream Frontier (2001), but it also takes things a step further. Blechner intuitively came up with a new word, “mindbrain.” This not only eliminates the slash, but, more important, eliminates the semantic trap of dualism, jumping out of an established way of thinking, and thus is something novel and creative—just like a dream.
To Blechner, the mindbrain is an organ of the human body that allows us to experience the world. It perceives the world through the sense organs, but it also transforms the world. The mindbrain is an information processor and transformer. We see these processes in action through dreams and artwork.
The first part of the book mainly describes how the mindbrain transforms the world. Blechner makes a detailed classification and presents different transformation forms to readers utilizing dreams and artworks. What impresses most is the richness of his case studies and his explanations of the different forms. In particular, Blechner’s study of the transformation form of symbols stands out. Segal (1978) says the symbol is used to overcome an accepted loss. The object is given up and mourned, and the symbol is set up in the inner world in its place. From Blechner’s view, because of the mindbrain, the inner world is
anchored and grounded in the outside world through symbols. With forms such as displacement, condensation, interobjects, and metaphor, the mindbrain makes those “unformulated, non-declarative knowledge” (p. 276) be seen, heard, and exited.
Later, Blechner explores the substrate of thought. He attempts to answer a question previously set out by Bion (1962/1977): How does alpha function work? Blechner suggests that the mindbrain is transforming (raw) sense impressions into more abstract, symbolized material. This field is ripe for