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The two cornerstones on which the whole structure of Freud's metapsychology rests are, on the one hand, the theory of dreams and, on the other, the theory of child development—that is, the ontogenesis of the mind from childhood to adulthood.
Children's Dreams, by Claudio Colace, combines these two cornerstones and adds to them, buttressing the foundations with some rigorous empirical, methodological, and epistemological research. This book is permeated by a sense of respect both for the methodology and goals of neuroscience and for psychoanalysis—the study of subjective experience as well as a general theory of mind. Colace is a clinical psychologist and a highly qualified neuroscientist at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where he was trained in sleep and dream research at the sleep laboratory. He subsequently studied at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna, where he received his PhD in psychology. The fact that the author is well versed in psychoanalytic theory can be perceived throughout the text. This book quickly captivates the reader with its approach and its humility.
The conceptual and methodological assumptions of Colace's research find their rightful place in the neuropsychoanalytic project in the strict sense. A multitude of authors have dealt with the study of dreams, both in neuroscience (e.g., Pace-Schott, Solms, Blagrove, & Harnad, 2002) and in psychoanalysis (e.g., Fisher, 1965). However, most of these studies deal with the subject of dreams for general information purposes, without an original focus on the correlation or specific comparison between data from empirical research and data from subjective dream reports or from dream research experiences within a psychoanalytic setting. Another more recent example of this trend, is the book by Merciai and Cannella (2009); while their text deals exhaustively with literature on the “borderline” between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, it does not add any new original element to eith