This is an especially timely book given that the teaching of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in US psychiatry training programs is under intense attack. The prolific Robert Langs, author or editor of over 40 books and 125 papers, has extended his earlier work based on frame and boundary concerns to address dream interpretation. Dreams and Emotional Adaptation is, in a sense, two separate books. More than the first half of this book is devoted to explaining the author's theory of emotional adaptation and how it is relevant to dreamwork. The remainder of the book describes the clinical application of this adaptive theory to understanding and interpreting dreams within the therapeutic relationship. Langs considers the dream to be the ‘very pinnacle of human communications’ (p. xi) and the mechanism by which we accomplish self-realisation, symptom alleviation and equanimity. Daily emotional events are triggers for dream formation, which in itself assists us in adapting to the challenges of our intrapsychic and interpersonal lives.