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In Basic Postulates,1 the first of a projected five volume series, Dr. French sketched his hypothesis that there is an 'integrative process in terms of which all kinds of behavior, rational as well as irrational, should be understood as variations'. Now, in his second volume, he attempts to demonstrate the operation of this hypothesis in dreams.
Addressing himself in the beginning to the psychoanalytically unsophisticated reader, he explains that dreams have since ancient times been regarded with superstitious awe as illogical and mysterious, and that Freud found out a few things about them; but that not until now is the full mystery to be resolved and the basic logic of the dream demonstrated. The new approach, he indicates, is eclectic, drawing upon gestalt and field psychology as well as psychoanalysis.
Different interpretations are sometimes made of the same dream by different psychoanalysts. Dr. French explains that these '"overdetermined" meanings of a dream seem often to have only accidental relations to one another; but when we study them carefully, we find that the fit together into a close-knit logical structure. We shall call this logical structure the "cognitive structure" of the dream' (p. 3). The cognitive structure is the result of 'dream organization', consisting of 'successive reorganizations' of 'cognitive patterns'. Many examples of the method of finding these cognitive patterns are presented, too lengthy to reproduce here, and too involved to summarize. The method makes limited use of the 'inarticulate' patient's admittedly 'meager' associations and liberal use of the very articulate author's abundant associations. As a result, interpretation of metaphor and allegory is at a minimum, and there is heavy reliance on symbols, intuition, and 'common sense'. (Analysts use more common sense than they realize but apparently not enough, according to Dr. French.) The author bases his speculations on second-hand incomplete data, using the clinical