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When Dr. Boss published his book Sinn und Gestalt der sexuellen Perversionen,1 in 1948, existential psychiatry was but little known in Europe and virtually unknown in the United States. Since then, existential philosophy and psychiatry have not only gained wide interest, but have also undergone considerable modifications. There are perhaps as many conceptions on existentialism today as there are authors. Boss himself seems to have developed into something of a purist among existentialists. In this work on dreams he emancipates himself even from Ludwig Binswanger, the foremost scientific exponent of existential psychiatry and phenomenology, with whom he so strongly identified heretofore. Thus he diverges from Binswanger's ideas on the dream because they involve the old assessment of dream phenomena as mere representations of the waking world.
In the preface, the author describes his book as 'an attempt to pave the way for the direct study of the dream phenomenon itself, by removing all the disguises and schemata of mental constructions of contemporary dream theories', and he adds: 'I shall not have failed completely in my task, if … I succeed in liberating the phenomenon of the dream from the psychological and anthropological point of view, hitherto adopted by those who have been studying dreams, and thus place it in its own light'.
It is obvious that this new framework cannot admit formulations based in some measure on the unconscious. Indeed, the author even discards as untenable the 'neoanalytic' theories of Schultz-Hencke, Fromm, and others, considering them to be essentially 'mechanistic' and not entirely divorced from the theory of instincts. He laments that the doctrines of Freud and Jung could only assume abstractions as the basis of dream formation; and 'one must lose all hope that the methods of natural science will ever lead to a discovery of the