Los sueños de Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Sus teorías sobre el ensueño desde la crítica a las teorías críticas de Freud [The dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal: His theories on dreaming from the critique of Freud's critical theories] by J. Rallo Romero, F. Marti Felipo, M. A. Jiménez Armero

The authors of this fascinating and well‐researched book have drawn upon their wealth of psychiatric and psychoanalytic experience. José Rallo Romero, recently deceased (2015), was one of the founders of the Spanish Psychoanalytic Society (Sociedad Psicoanalítica Española), and later the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association (Asociación Psicoanalítica de Madrid), of which he was also president. The subject of dreams, to which he devoted

several articles and essays, occupied a permanent place in his clinical research work.

The richness of this book is underpinned by its extraordinary source material: the finding of the handwritten journals of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the prominent Spanish histologist and contemporary of Freud, in which he records and comments upon his own dreams over the course of 16 years (1918–34). On the basis of this material, the authors propose a psychoanalytic approach to an as yet unexamined aspect in Cajal's personal and professional life, taking his dreams as a reference point with the intention that this study should serve to open up a reflection upon forgotten aspects of his life, in particular his later years.

The Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) is considered to be the father of modern neuroscience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1906 for his discoveries on the structure of the nervous system and the role of the neuron, an award he shared with Golgi. His interest in psychology, particularly in dreams and daydreams, from a standpoint of intense criticism towards Freud and psychoanalysis, was well known by all biographers and scholars of Ramón y Cajal's work. Cajal upheld a rationalism which was at odds with the Freudian emphasis on the unconscious and repressed desires as fundamental to the understanding of the dream life. However, it was precisely the irrational nature of dreams that attracted his interest, postulating th