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Oscar Wilde somewhere says: 'The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.' As one of Freud's public, Raymond de Becker faithfully exemplifies the truth of Wilde's witticism. In this rather over-ambitious undertaking to inform us of the value of dreams 'as motives for action', the author has only two things to offer: an indiscriminate compilation of interesting dream-material from mythology, history and folklore that stays inert in his fervent adulation of its virtue; and an acrid wrangle with Freud for having made of dreams the inner reality humans live from. Mr Becker is not content with stating that 'an unsolved sexual problem lurks in the background of Freud's theories' of wish-fulfilment in dreams. He retails unidentifiable gossip about what led to Jung's break with Freud: 'While we wait for unpublished Correspondence of the two giants of modern psychology to reveal the full details of the reasons for their break with each other, I would like to put forward a fundamental cause, which was told to me in confidence. There came a time when Jung considered that, by continuing to accept the Freudian theories, life lost its meaning and that there was nothing left but to commit suicide. It was Freud's most intelligent disciples who had committed suicide, those who had best assessed the consequences of his theories; Jung considered that, apart from cowardice, only a lack of intelligence and a total failure to realize the logical outcome of Freud's theories could keep anyone from ending their lives. This is supposed to have been the fundamental reason why Jung broke away.' Is this the sort of data Paul Roazen has acclaimed as: 'For what seems gossip to one generation may be the history of tomorrow'? A dreadful prospect indeed!