Träume Der Blinden Vom Standpunkt Der Phänomenologie, Tiefenpsychologie, Mythologie Und Kunst (Dreams of the Blind from the Standpoint of Phenomenology, Depth Psychology, Mythology, and Art): By Hans-Joachim von Schumann. Basel, Switzerland: S. Karger AG., 1959. 152 pp.

This major contribution to the phenomenology of dreams of the blind constitutes a summary of the author's clinical experience and explorations in the graphic and musical arts, literature, philosophy, and religion. The psychoanalyst will find stimulation on almost every page. Of unusual interest are five reproductions of drawings and paintings illustrating dreams of the blind, and a musical analysis of the treatment of dreams of the blind in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Moussorgsky's Boris Godunoff, and d'Albert's Die toten Augen. Dreams in the polar night—vivid wish-fulfilling visual dreams and anxiety dreams resulting from living in prolonged darkness and in a generally monotonous environment—are similar to dreams of the blind. There is also an instructive discussion of dreams of patients with organic brain disease whose vision itself is not affected but who have serious disturbances in visual memory and apperception.

Unfortunately the monograph has serious shortcomings which should not deter the psychoanalytic reader but which vitiates its value for other readers, particularly professional workers with the blind or those in training for such work. Von Schumann's Tiefenpsychologie turns out to be a mixture of existentialism and Jungian mysticism with a solid endocrino-neuro-physiology. His rich observations remain unintegrated, a cataloguing under this and that phenomenological heading or field of study. He repeatedly finds his clinical observations confirmed in mythology and the arts. There is