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The first step in the history of psychoanalysis was Freud's discovery of dream analysis around 1898 and exemplified by the dream of Irma's injection in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). The present book helps to demonstrate how fertile that original discovery continues to be. Not only did the revelations of the unconscious spawn interest in group behaviour quite at variance with orthodox sociology, but also the further study of dreams. In the context of a group and the free association of group members, Gordon Lawrence indicated the valuable parallel between the way dreams focus a group's attention and the way they focus an analyst's attention in clinical work with an individual. However, it assists the exposure of the hidden group
Contact: Bob Hinshelwood, email: bobhinsh@gmail.com
process formed by the unconscious levels of the individuals coming together. Social dreaming has acquired an enthusiastic following.
Of course, not every single member of a group is drawn into the fascination with a dream every time, but usually, most are. There is much to understand about how that group cohesion comes about. We are driven to accept that dreams, like everything else, come to us in the context of our social world day-by-day, and indeed indicated by Freud's “residues of the day”.
In this well-written and clear book, Rose Redding Mersky is asking us to come with her on a further step forward. This step is to recognise that drawings made by group members of a dream presented in the group provide vivid and especially finely detailed meanings in the impact of dreams presented. Such drawings provide a more permanent record for study and for exposing the impact of a dream on the individual's and the group processes.
This, I suggest, could link with another tradition that attempts to harness the method of art therapy to the social impact of dreaming. Whereas art as therapy is the production of unconscious imagery akin to the individual's dream imagery, the drawings from a soc