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Ernest Hartmann's most recent book is a delight to read and a wonderful embodiment of the very concepts that are so thoughtfully elucidated within the free flowing text. Hartmann, a renowned psychoanalyst and sleep and dreaming researcher and the author of such books as The Functions of Sleep (1973), The Sleeping Pill (1978), and more recently, The Nightmare (1984), has long been concerned with the search for a unifying “biology of the mind” that underlies complex yet often ephemeral psychologic and psychoanalytic explanatory concepts. Heretofore, Hartmann's emphasis has been restricted to proposing a model for translating the psychology of dreams to a biochemical formulation of the brain (1973, 1976, 1982). In the present volume, Hartmann expands his focus of inquiry to nothing less than the whole of human personality. On the basis of his ongoing work with frequent nightmare sufferers who consistently presented as exceptionally sensitive, vulnerable, and open persons who lacked higher level defenses, Hartmann proposes that the concept of mental boundaries, as expressed in a large number of dimensions, “represents a neglected dimension of personality, one that can help us understand aspects of our lives that no other measure can explain” (p. 4).
In the first part of Boundaries in the Mind, Hartmann elucidates 12 broad categories of boundaries, defined as the degree of connectedness