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This book is the edited proceedings of a seminar on dreams held in Philadelphia in 1985. The perspectives on dreams considered are new only in the sense that they differ in some respects from the ideas advanced by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Although each author has previously expressed his ideas in the literature, this should not be taken as a drawback, since this presentation is a very nice synthesis of those previously expressed ideas. With that caveat, let us look at the book's contents.
The papers divide neatly into two groups, one on theory and one on technique. Those on theory (Fosshage, Greenberg, and Palombo) present a model of dreaming that in one respect or another is significantly different from Freud's. For Fosshage, “dreaming is a mentational process occurring during sleep whereby we continue to assimilate and organize waking thoughts and events according to previously established organizational principles … or through the development of new psychic configurations” (p. 29). That is, dreaming is cognition during sleep, differing from waking cognition only in that it uses imagery instead of words. Greenberg sees dreams as attempts at problem solving, an activity that constitutes an important aspect of their more general function of organizing information. Palombo also sees dreaming as a mode of information processing, with the brain registering information during waking hours and matching it against previous experience while asleep. The major differences between these authors and Freud are in the areas of the function of the dream, the presence of defense, disguise, distortion, and conflict, and the implications of their models for technique. I will examine each of these areas.
For Freud, the function of dreaming was to protect sleep. Powerful instinctual drives, active at night and less well defended against by the sleeping ego, threatened to emerge into consciousness and impel activity. Rather than awaken, the dreamer hallucinates the