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Were it not for the eminence of the author, this book would possess little importance. Even as it is, its value is greatly diminished by the fact that it constitutes a study in a field where the writer had had little experience and no training. It is easy for anyone with a personal knowledge of Dr. Rivers to point to numerous places in the analyses here recorded where further insight was blocked by his own characteristic inhibitions. None of the dream interpretations given reach further than the pre-conscious layer of the mind, and throughout the whole book the unconscious proper is never dealt with.
The book has been hailed as an annihilating criticism of Freud's theory of dreams, but this is in no sense true. In spite of the considerations just adduced, the conclusions reached deviate in no important respect from those of Freud so far as they go. In other words, the author has been able to confirm Freud's theory up to a certain point, though not beyond this where it concerns the deeper layers of the mind. Thus, he agrees with Freud that dreams are of great psychical significance; that the distinction between the manifest and latent content is of cardinal importance; that the latent content indicates a remarkable distortion (which he prefers to term transformation) before it is converted into the manifest content; that there are regular laws by which this transformation occurs; that the latent content is a repressed one—in short, all the more essential parts of Freud's theory. He dislikes Freud's term 'wish-fulfilment' and prefers to regard the dream as the expression of an attempt to solve some conflict; the difference here is in most cases verbal only.