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In this book Richard Kradin, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, draws from his experience in teaching dream interpretation at the Center for Psychoanalytical Studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital and offers us a practical guide for dream interpretation. In a didactic manner, Kradin describes what he does with dreams, how he teaches students to receive and handle dreams in treatment, and the way he works with dreams in supervision groups. Most specifically, the central concept of Kradin's thesis extends from the word herald which means to announce or to foretell; he uses this concept to further elaborate Jung's fundamental ideas about the initial dream.
It must be remembered Jung (1947) emphasized the diagnostic and prognostic importance of the initial dream in bringing forward the essential etiological factors of the dreamer's inner situation. This beginning material offers insight into the origins of psychic structure and, along with anticipating the prognosis, it may hint at therapeutic management of the main treatment issues. Building on Jung's examination of initial dreams, Kradin tries to define the ‘initial conditions’ of the psyche and to predict the ‘trajectory of the treatment’.
The first half of the book is devoted to explication and comparison of psychoanalytic and Jungian views of the unconscious and dream work in conjunction with contemporary neuropsychological and cognitive research findings. The second half is devoted to the analysis of the herald dreams of 8 patients, 5 men and 3 women.
Chapter two, ‘Dreams in Theory’, deals with sleep and dreams, consciousness in dreams, dreams and time, and dreams and the unconscious. Of interest in this chapter is Kradin's ability to develop a kind of dialogue between psychoanalytic models of psyche (Jung and Freud) and systems of understanding from comparative religion and Buddhist psychology, for instance comparing Freud's idea of psychological achievement with the Buddhist notion of therapeutic