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This is a reprint of a book first published in the United States in 1940. It represents remarkable value, for the author gives an enormous amount in fewer than 200 pages, with a workmanlike index and an exhaustive list of references on the psychology and physiology of dreaming added for good measure. He has arranged his complex material with great skill, and writes with commendable clarity, but the range of his study and the rigour of its presentation demand hard work from the reader.
Putting Freud's classical dream theories alongside the findings of modern dream research, his book derives from speculation about what Freud would have made of these predominantly neurophysical findings, and how he might have changed his dream theory in response to them. The author is, however, clearly no iconoclast, but rather a thinker less hampered than most by loyalty to past systems channelled by new experimental data.
The first chapter deals with the distinction between the psychoanalytic theory of dream interpretation and the psychoanalytic theory of dreaming. Failure to make this distinction has often bedevilled dream psychology. Chapter 2 traces Freud's original theory of dreaming to its manifold conceptual roots. It ends with the statement that ‘recent studies of the psychophysiology of sleep and dreaming have rejustified Freud's loyalty to Darwin in these matters while showing his loyalty to Newton to have been a costly mistake’. This statement is taken up in a later chapter on new theoretical frames, commending the formulations by George Klein and Robert White for their clarity.
The review of the laboratory study of sleep and dreaming over the past 20 years is comprehensive and defies summarising. In essence it shows that dreams occur during specific periods of sleep, characterised by a host of bodily changes and called ‘the D-state’. Dreaming is considered to be an augmentative human response to the D-state.
Jones thinks that Freud could not have resisted the pleasures of reth