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This is the 17th in a series of publications by the New Library of Psychoanalysis, which began publishing in 1987 in association with the London Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Sara Flanders, who has compiled 13 papers selected from writings about dreams within the past 25 years, sets the tone for this collection with the opening sentence of her introduction: “Today, nearly a century after Freud's great breakthrough in the understanding of dreams…the dream no longer occupies the center of psychoanalytic debate” (p. 1). This book is intended to illustrate “the heterogeneity of an international psychoanalytic view of dreams” (p. 7).
Flanders's introduction is a lucid presentation of Freud's evolving concepts of the construction and significance of dreams, and she pragmatically indicates problems as they developed in the course of Freud's changing thoughts.
Freud's insistence on the need for associations to uncover the disguised or latent meaning of the dream, coupled with his less emphatic but clear recognition of the expressive meaningfulness of symbolic imagery constitutes a problematic around which succeeding generations of analysts have struggled. (p. 5)
The increasing recognition of trauma in the transference and “traumatic dreams” was addressed by Freud's explicating the major exception to the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams and continues to be explored today.
Flanders points out the significant contributions of Ella Sharpe, Bertram Lewin and his dream screen, D. W. Winnicott and his understanding that the play of children is rich with emotional and symbolic significances (referred to by Khan in his chapter), and the contributions of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion.