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This book was written as a thesis to revalidate the author's Spanish doctor's degree in the Argentine. At the same time Dr. Garma took the occasion to go beyond the official requirements and to present to the Argentine public an authoritative account of Freud's theory of dreams and of psychoanalysis as a therapy, with emphasis on the rôle of dream interpretation during treatment. The latter slant distinguishes this book from the work of Freud himself and in general from other books which limit their attention more or less to the psychology of dreams. Thus, though to a certain extent Dr. Garma follows Freud's plan of setting forth the prefreudian history of dream interpretation and notes the views of the Greeks and of Mourly Vold, Maury, and Scherner, and goes on to explain the various terms and mechanisms introduced by Freud, when it comes to exemplifying his exposition, he does not report his own dreams, but instead presents a long list of dreams of patients.
The author is thus compelled to go into the psychology of the neuroses and to outline the 'three contributions'. The dream interpretations are interesting and informative, but they appear somewhat abbreviated and formal; they lack the exhaustive associative material which Freud so tellingly brings to bear on his own dreams. And by their close connection with the quite fantastic symptomalogy of the patients, the reader encounters the danger of thinking of dreams as pathology in the old fashioned sense, rather than as the universal vehicle of the unconscious in everyone. Except for this restriction the author's account is very successful and should enlighten the limited public to which it is addressed. An original theme is an effort to see the working of traumatic situations and the ensuing disagreeable content in dreams of persons without full blown 'traumatic neuroses'. The book is concluded by a chapter on the great Spanish classic, Calderon's La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), in which the simila