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The classical emphasis on repression as primary to psychological functioning has largely been replaced in the work of contemporary, relationally oriented theorists by a view of dissociation as the mental activity most relevant to the regulation of potentially overwhelming emotional experience. The collection of essays comprising Philip Bromberg's Awakening the Dreamer expands and elaborates the ideas he develops in Standing in the Spaces, wherein he began in earnest to persuade Freud, “or at least his ghost,” (p. 2) of the need to reexamine the prominence of dissociation and its utility and consequences. To that end, Awakening the Dreamer provides compelling evidence to clinicians working with traumatized patients. Every chapter in the book, each of which stands on its own as a well-crafted and valuable contribution to the literature, holds the prism of dissociation to the light, reflecting its many facets as they pertain to development, psychopathology, and psychoanalytic treatment.
Bromberg's 1991 assertion that dissociation is a normal, hypnoidal capacity of the mind (first pointed out by Janet in ) contributes to paving the way for psychoanalysis to reconceptualize the mind as a multiplicity of self-states, each with its own sense of self organized around a dominant affect, access to memory, and particular ways of organizing relational input