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This book by Arthur Epstein, a psychoanalyst and Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry and Neurology, is a summation of the author's 30 years of work on the relationship of dreaming to brain pathology. Epstein states at the outset that the goal of his essay is to correlate such involuntary mental phenomena as dreams and fixed ideation (e.g., phobias) with their underlying neural substrates in the brain. Citing recent developments in neural network theory, Epstein reasons that all involuntary (and presumably voluntary) mentation can be explained by two fundamental properties of neural tissues—connectivity and excitability. Throughout this short book, Epstein attempts to demonstrate these points by integrating a brief discussion of neurophysiology with a host of observations, primarily from his own previously unpublished clinical experience.
In the first chapters, Epstein roughly outlines such core concepts as associationism and memory, as well as various brain pathologies such as epilepsy and aphasia. Then Epstein introduces dreaming and its various vicissitudes. Unfortunately, much of this discussion is at a very elementary level, particularly that involving psychological concepts as best exemplified in the chapter (barely five pages) on the associational bases of learning. Here, Epstein's account does not progress very far from the writings of Pavlov and Freud (a curious inclusion on this topic). Similarly, the discussion on memory and category processing is woefully out of date and far too basic for one to form any meaningful hypotheses about the function and mechanisms of these neural processes. Indeed, considerable recent work in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience has greatly advanced our understanding of the