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Werner Kemper's Der Traum und seine Be-Deutung has appeared in Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopädie, a series of pocket-books, which attempts to present scientific knowledge of today to the lay public. (L. S. Kubie's book Psycho-analysis Without Secret has appeared in the same series.)
Kemper gives a short introduction, summarizing attitudes towards the dream and its evaluation up to the time of the appearance of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and describing the scientific climate at the turn of the century, Freud's scientific background, and how his hypothesis of the unconscious led to his first concepts of the dream.
The main part of the book consists of five chapters: Source of the Dream, Dreamwork, Function of the Dream, Content of the Dream (inner and outer reality), and the (so-called) Dream-Interpretation.
The technique of dream-interpretation is convincingly demonstrated throughout. The presentation of well-chosen dream material from Kemper's own work shows the skill of the analyst and the experienced hand of a teacher and writer. The reader is very often put into the position of almost foreseeing the next step and so experiencing to some extent the co-operation which develops between analyst and analysand, and how inner and out perception widens.
The author decides against a dogmatic presentation of psycho-analytic theory. He hopes to clarify and prepare the way for future agreement by comparing concepts of different schools of thought. This wish may have grown through many years of enforced co-operation, when the Institute in Berlin was a place of some tolerance in spite of Nazi rule; but one is surprised that a task of such magnitude should be attempted in a book written for the lay public.
Many conceptual details are discussed lucidly, but Kemper's eclectic approach leads the discerning reader—if not Kemper himself—into contradictions. To illustrate the point: On pages 116–17 Kemper says that Jung, Maeder and Schultz-Hencke's concept of the compens