You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is an extraordinary and timely contribution to the psychoanalytic literature, one that demonstrates the author's unusual scholarly and clinical versatility in explicating a very important theme—the capacity for dreams to be the living archive for veridical traumata from the earliest times of life—and even before. Having found this correlation to be proved over and over again in her own practice, she sought to reconcile her clinical conviction with traditional and current psychoanalytic theory and practice. Her efforts took her into many associated areas of study, including the issues of narrative versus reconstruction in psychoanalytic practice, the origins and categories of memory, the concept of psychical trauma, and the fundamental nature of dreams and dream work. One of the paradoxical conclusions that I took away from Lynda Share's exciting and prodigious efforts was the notion that maybe even Freud himself, let alone most of his followers, may have underestimated the importance of dreams!
The author is a well-trained and skilled psychoanalyst who has an unusual gift in understanding her patients' dreams. Starting with this predisposition and with her relentless proclivity to ferret out her patients' associations to the manifest details of their dreams, she became aware that archaic traumatic memories were beginning to reveal themselves—not unlike the experience of the art curator who may, as in the case with a pentimento, uncover an older drawing that lay obscured underneath a superimposed drawing—a palimpsest, as it were. Gradually, Share became aware of an increasing number of instances in which real traumata spoke out loudly as the significant veridical latent content of many of her patients' dreams.
In brief, her contribution postulated that dreams were an authentic vehicle for the retrieval of actual infant—and even fetal—