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There is a passage in Freud's New Introductory Lectures where he remarks on the steady decline in recent years in the number of scientific contributions to the interpretation of dreams. 'Analysts', he observes, 'behave as though they had nothing more to say about the dream, as though the whole subject of dream-theory were finished and done with'. Now it certainly cannot be said that we have solved all the problems connected with the dream. Much as psycho-analysis has taught us concerning the aims and essence of dreams, a whole series of questions still await an answer. Some of these will be found discussed in Ella Sharpe's valuable new book, which she describes as A Practical Handbook for Psycho-Analysts.
This designation alone tells us that the new book is primarily concerned with the practical aspects of psycho-therapy. This aim defines its scope and prescribes its method. Proceeding from the conception that the dream has something to say, the author deals with the question: 'How does the dream say it?' Here she introduces a happy analogy between the modes of expression available to the dream and to language, the images and metaphors of everyday speech and poetry. One only regrets that the author has confined herself in this part of the book to individual mental products; one could have wished that besides the neat examples culled from poetic sources she had turned to mythology, puns and jokes for others. (For instance, on p. 22 it would have been relevant to recall the part played by the totem-tree, the biblical tree of life, etc.) The view which Miss Sharpe sustains that we all learn our mother-tongue phonetically is worth pursuing for its important bearings on the dream-work. In the field of symbolism we shall have once more to turn our attention to the problem how symbols are created afresh out of individual material. We are given an able and vigorous exposition of the mechanism of dramatization and of the relation between the interpretation of dre