You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
'Il Teatro del Sogno'—'The Theatre of the Dream', is the result of a very personal meditation and re-elaboration of some of the problems connected with the dream, undertaken by S. Resnik. The author is an Argentinian analyst living in Paris. He has studied with E. Pichon-Riviere in Argentina, the philosopher, M. Merleau Ponty in Paris, W. R. Bion, H. Rosenfeld and the anthropologist M. Douglas in England. He dedicates this book to W. R. Bion, by whom he was particularly influenced, and who seemed to appreciate Resnik's way of thinking.
Resnik's suggestion is that we should consider the dream as if it were a theatrical experience and performance, in which we could find condensed and illustrated all the various theatrical genres: the tragic, the comic, the satiric etc., in their various mixtures. Resnik insists on the fact that the scenario of the dream is not based on the usual tridimensional space and chronological sequential structure—he stresses the pluridimensional space and time aspects of the dream. The actors, the personages of this theatrical experience, possess a sort of mask, which has to be understood and disclosed by the interpreter.
If I have understood correctly, one of the aims of this approach to the dream would be to describe and to underline the emotional and cognitive importance of the various ways in which space and time are manifested and expressed in the dream, as part of the dreaming process itself. According to Resnik, space and time are intrinsic parts of our internal world and our object relationships and therefore it is worthwhile trying to study them. Resnik seems to be very much influenced by the phenomenological psychiatrist, E. Minkowski, who paid great attention to, and described in great detail, the various experiences of space and time for psychotic patients such as schizophrenics, paranoiacs, manic depressives and catatonics, and the way in which their experience differs from that of less disturbed kinds of patients.
Another so