Awakening the dreamer: Clinical journeys by Philip M. Bromberg Mahwah, NJ:  The Analytic Press. 2006.  223 p.

Philip Bromberg's Awakening the dreamer is a collection of nine essays—an introductory chapter and eight revisions of previously published papers. The title is somewhat enigmatic: the book, except for its second and eighth chapters, is not primarily about dreams and dream interpretation as much as it is an exposition of Bromberg's version of relational psychoanalysis. However, the clinical primacy of bringing forward dissociated self states, typical of those of the dreamer behind the text of the dream narrative, orients us to the author's strong emphasis on self states, dissociation, collusion, enactment, and negotiation. The awakening of the dreamer stands, therefore, as the central organizing metaphor for the all-important task of working through of the propensity toward dissociation and thereby increasing the tolerance for the experience of intrapsychic conflict, which Bromberg, differing from the mainstream notion of conflict, understands to be the containing of more than one ‘conflicting’ self state in consciousness at the same time. Bromberg is a gifted clinical writer with a vivid style that conveys with immediacy the analytic encounter. His theoretical exposition is poetical, drawing liberally from literary sources and from his own autobiographical recollections.

Bromberg's book centers on the traumatized patient and privileges the immanence of the analytic encounter and the fullness of the analyst's, and, increasingly as the work unfolds, the traumatized and dissociation-prone patient's emotional participation. The felt lack of such fullness, both in the patient's first telling of the text of a remembered dream narrative and generally in the analytic session and in the patient's life, is, for Bromberg, a reflection of dissociation, not just in the analysand, but in the analyst as well, and it is reflected inevitably in the unfolding analytic process. It is in this context that Bromberg's central concepts come to bear: dissociation, that is to say, true hypno