The Dream Frontier

The Dream Frontier is that rare book that makes available the cumulative wisdom of a century's worth of clinical examination of dreams and then reconfigured that wisdom on the basis of research in cognitive neuroscience. Drawing on psychodynamic theorists and neuroscientific researchers with equal fluency and grace, Mark Blechner introduces the reader to a conversation of the finest minds, from Freud to Jung, from Sullivan to Erikson, from Aserinksy and Kleitman to Hobson, as the work toward an understanding of dreams and dreaming that is both scientifically credible and personally meaningful.

The dream, in Blechner's elegantly conceived overview, offers itself to the dreamer as an answer to a question yet to be asked. Approached in thi open-ended manner, dreams come to reveal the meaning-making systems of the unconscious in the total absence of waking considerations of reality testing and communicability. Systems of dream interpretation arise as helpful, if inherently limited, strategies for apprehending this unconscious quest for meaning. Whereas students will appreciate Blechner's concise reviews of the various schools of dream interpretation, teachers and supervisors will value his astute reexamination of the very process of interpretating dreams, which includes the manner in which group discussion of dreams may be employed to correct for individual interpretive biases.

Elegantly written, lucidly argued, deftly synooptic but never ponderous in tone, The Dream Frontier provides a fresh outlook on the century just passed along with the keys to the antechambers of the new century's reinvestigation of fundamental questions of conscious and unconscious mental life. It transcends the typical limits of interdisciplinary reportage and brings both researcher and clinician to the threshold of a new, mutually enriching exploration of the dream frontier in search of basic answers to basic questions.

Part I: Introduction and Overview. The Dream Frontier. Part II: New Ways of Thinking About Dreams. The Analysis and Creation of Dream Meaning. Secondary Revision, Tertiary Revision, and Beyond. Who Creates, Has, Remembers, Tells, and Interprets the Dream? We Never Lie in Our Dreams. Condensation and Interobjects. Oneiric Darwinism. Dreams and the Language of Thought. Part III: Clinical Work With Dreams. Vectors of Dream Interpretation. How to Analyze Dreams: Fundamental Principles. How to Analyze Dreams: Special Topics. Homonyms and Other Wordplay in Dreams. Dream Acts: Dreams in Analysis as Actions. Dream Symbols. Kleinian Positions and Dreams. The Patient's Dreams and the Countertransference. Dreams as Supervision, Dreams in Supervision. The Clinical Use of Countertransference Dreams. The Reallocation of Madness. Part IV: Sleep, Dreams, and the Brain. Knowing What We Know in Waking and Dreaming . What Dreams Can Tell Us About the Brain. Endoneuropsychic Perception.

Mark J. Blechner, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst and Teaching Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute and at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A member of the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Dr. Blechner also participates in the study group on neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He has written numerous articles on dreams and is the editor of Hope and Mortality: Psychodynamic Approaches to AIDS (Analytic Press, 1997).