You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr James Hall's earlier and comprehensive book, entitled Clinical Uses of Dreams, aimed to cover a wide range of theories of dream interpretation as published in the literature and practised by analysts and psychotherapists of many persuasions—up to the time of his writing that book. In my congratulatory review of the book in this Journal in 1982 (Vol. 27, No. 2), I hoped and expected that we would
hear yet more from Dr Hall on the subject. The present volume, albeit briefer and more limited in scope, offers a deeper and throughly practical exposé of the detailed methods and techniques employed by specifically Jungian analysts in that field—though I could find no reference to work done by some analysts belonging to the Society of Analytical Psychology at one end of the scale or by Hillman and his followers at the other.
For all that, Hall's book brings together a number of the considerations that need to be at the back of the minds of all Jungian analysts, whether they are inclined to interpret the dream alone in its prima facie purity or as part of the material supplied by the patient as a whole. According to that second approach the dream is considered within and as a part of the patient's spontaneous flow of associative communications whether during the session in which the dream is presented or during preceding or subsequent ones. In this case, emphasis is being laid more upon the analysis of the patient as a person than of his dream as such.
Hall very much, and surely rightly so, links his understanding of dreams with his conceptual apparatus, and so, in his first chapter, he broadly sketches out his view of the basic Jungian concepts involved. Thus he expounds the theory of the personal and collective consciousness by contrast with that of the personal unconscious and the objective psyche. Complexes, archetypes and archetypal images are defined in their interrelationships. Identity structures such as ego and shadow are distinguished from relational structures