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It is difficult for a reviewer to be fair towards a book that is irritating. I shall therefore try to get the irritation out of the way by stating that to a Jungian reader it contains nothing new. The authors emphasize the need for a detailed and disciplined approach to the intuitive and empathic understanding of dreams. But their use of the same metaphors several times within the book's small compass, and the deployment of important-sounding subheadings as well as such favoured phrases as ‘spell out’, made this work unpleasurable reading to me.
The ‘new approach’ lies in the reiterated statement ‘psycho-analytic interpretation is an intuitive art’ and the authors aim to make this intuitive art into ‘an objectively critical interpretative method’. This is done by the simple device of first finding an intuitive insight and then checking this intuition critically, and in every detail. The evidence includes the manifest dream as well as the knowledge of the dreamer's situation. The authors claim that this approach is an art that must be learnt, but what it boils down to is that intuitive dream interpretation should be subjected to self-discipline. One cannot but agree with the authors that without self-discipline dream interpretation would deteriorate into a Procrustean-bed technique. It should also be self-evident that nobody can take in the whole content and meaning of a dream at first glance (hence the danger of using dream interpretation in order to tell the patient something that the analyst has already in mind).
The thesis with which analytical psychologists would be in agreement is that dreams do in fact have several meanings, all of which can fit together intelligibly, and that the units which constitute these meanings are concerned with solving problems, i.e. not just with wish-fulfilling phantasies, as Freud originally said. The problem-solving centres on the dreamer's personal situation at the moment of dreaming. It is related to the kind of thinking that take