Review of Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys by Philip M. Bromberg

A wakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys by Philip Bromberg, published by The Analytic Press, is a dream read, both in terms of its substance and its feeling tone. It is the follow-up book to Bromberg's Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation, and it deserves as much attention and praise as its predecessor evoked. Like the previous book, this one too, while oriented to the interpersonal experiences between patient and therapist, also delves into the most deeply sequestered feelings and fantasies of both patient and analyst and into the role of dissociation as it appears in many clinical situations. Early on in the Introduction, Bromberg exclaims that he is “trying to convince Freud (or at least his ghost) that after 100 years of attempting to exclude the phenomenon of dissociation from his theory of mental functioning, it remains more alive than ever” (p. 2).

Bromberg makes clear the distinction between dissociation and repression. He is proposing that for psychoanalysis to remain relevant to understanding the mind, certain concepts need to be retheorized in relationship to how we now understand self-states and dissociation. He focuses not only on interpersonal perspectives but also on the inwardness of the self. In particular, what he brings to the table in stunning fashion is not only the impact of trauma on the patient but also how the exploration of the transference and countertransference and the relevance of the patients' dreams are