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This book takes its title from the theme of the Seventh International Congress of Analytical Psychology held in Rome in 1977 under the chairmanship of Gerhard Adler. It is an important work, for definitive compilations on methods of treatment (such as has been attempted in volume two of the Library of Analytical Psychology) are still not common, though Jung himself, before he died, welcomed fresh views developed from his work, and practitioners have not been idle in the twenty years since his death. For me, therefore, the book is representative of one of the most productive of all I.A.A.P. Congresses.
I will consider, in summary, some of the more important contributions in order to excite the reader's interest and to offer him some kind of coherent picture of the book as a whole, in spite of the fact that it is presented as a collection of disparate chapters, arranged in alphabetical order of authors' names.
In his paper, ‘On the methodology of dream interpretation’, Hans Dieckmann notes the partial dissolution of ego boundaries and regards that as leading to the emergence of a more relaxed dream ego, which can then register a problem not previously recognised and enable it to emerge into fuller consciousness. Dieckmann remarks on the way that different types of people react to their dreams, and stresses the importance of tracing the details of a dream which tend to be omitted on first rendering.
The papers given by Thomas Kirsch, Kenneth Lambert and Mario Moreno are also about dreams. Kirsch, in ‘Dreams and psychological types’, not only attends to the relevance of those types, but also refers to a variety of attitudes to dreams. He suggests several ways of trying to bring dreams home to the dreamer who cannot yet relate them to his life situation. His paper bears comparison with Dieckmann's. He goes on to record his development as a therapist from his earlier, more expectant, approach to his recent more immediately spontaneous responses which he attributes to enlarge