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It is hard to do justice to a book that is largely a description of experiential work and of its techniques without having personally undergone the exercises the author is describing in her work with groups. Whilst there are plenty of examples given within the text, I found myself struggling to understand what the experience of the work is actually like. It is apparent in her preface that Denise Gimenez Ramos has worked with these exercises and, from this experience, she asserts that ‘this innovative technique allows… a deepening in the unconscious, facilitating the mobilization of symbols and rapidly establishing connections with consciousness’. Rauscher Gallbach also provides plenty of reports from group participants which offer evidence that, for the group participant, the experience is powerful and therapeutic, but the efficacy of the process has to be taken on trust. Without direct involvement the reader is left somewhat detached.
The book is a development from the author's doctoral thesis and describes the process whereby she works with individuals in ‘dream experience groups’. These are small groups of 3-6 participants who meet weekly for the purpose of ‘dream-processing’. The individual relates a dream to the group in the present tense, titles it and then follows a very detailed procedure of observing all aspects of the dream and its dramatic structure. The second stage is described as ‘elaboration of the complexes’. Here the dreamer lists the attitudes he or she sees as underlying the generalized actions and then evaluates these actions describing them as positive or negative. The negative attitudes are transformed into their opposites by the dreamer imagining what the positive version of that attitude would be. The participant then undertakes an ‘imaginative re-creation of the dream’ by writing out how the dream might have been if the positive rather than the negative attitudes were embraced within it. All this is then reported to the group who feed back th