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Presented as a symposium, this collection of papers from various sources here and abroad is a curious combination. It includes some behavioristic essays, others speculatively mythological, a summary of recent experimental observations in this country, and several antiquated criticisms of freudian theory.
The Gesell Institute presents a normative study of sleep patterns up to the age of sixteen. We are told that in 'primitive' cultures where children are allowed to stay up until they are sleepy there are no sleep disturbances. Some of the data are interesting and difficult to explain. For example, between two and three years of age children often awaken from naps in a very irritable state, which is also a common distressing symptom of older psychotic children. Dreams are found to have a definite sequence of content: what are daytime fears in the child today are likely to appear in dreams twelve to sixteen months later. A significant change appears at the age of seven when the child becomes the 'central acting figure' of his dreams; this change is said to coincide with the child's becoming aware of himself as separate from his mother. The author concludes that individual differences are based upon Sheldon's constitutional types; fat people sleep better than thin.
The second paper is a review of some of the literature concerning the etiology of sleep and the physiological changes that accompany it. There is also a simplified presentation, based upon psychoanalytic ideas, of the intrapsychic factors related to sleep. Next comes a criticism of Freud's theory of dreams from the 'scientific logical' point of view. For example, the author states that symbols cannot be present in dreams because symbols are signs intended to express an idea, 'but in the dream intentional and coördinated thinking has ceased to exist'. The author's theory of the dream has to do with prelogical thinking which is not clearly distinguishable most of the dream mechanisms mentioned in Freu