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.
Within the Jungian community, books about dreams must certainly be the most frequently published, so much so that one wonders whether there is a need for yet another book on dreams or whether there is anything new to say about dreams. However, in this instance, Marcus West capably sets aside those concerns with this new volume in the SAP Monograph Series. For those readers unfamiliar with West, he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, is a previous winner of the Michael Fordham Prize, and has previously displayed a capacity for original, integrative thought in his 2007 volume - Peeling, Being and the Sense of Self.
His current book, Understanding Dreams in Clinical Practice, is clearly written for a psychologically sophisticated reader but West takes time to build his points clearly and deliberately without introducing an overabundance of jargon from the analytic vocabulary. He provides concise definitions of concepts in terms the average reader can understand but weaves them into the overall narrative in a seamless manner.
In the early chapters of the book West nicely lays out a basic understanding of both Jung's and Freud's fundamental perspectives on dreams, but goes beyond a simple recounting of their theories of dream formation, developmental processes, and central organizing influences. He outlines the differences between the two perspectives without becoming disparaging of Freud's perspective, nor overly aggrandizing in his assessment of Jung's position. West offers up Ignacio Matte-Blanco's conceptual formulation of ‘unconscious symmetry’ as a theoretical bridge between the two perspectives rather than falling into a dichotomization of the positions. Periodically, West engages in an even-handed critique of Jung's approach to dreams; for example, Jung's tendency to show preference for interpreting archetypal themes over relational patterns. As this section develops, West revises and extends the theories of both founders by exploring