Dream Life: A Re-examination of the Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique

by Donald Meltzer

"Dreams are my landscape", said Meltzer. In this book he re-establishes psychoanalysis as the art of reading dreams, and dream-life as the core of mental processes. Dreams are not just puzzles to be decoded, the effluence of past trauma or future wish-fulfilment; they are the psyche's attempt with a varying level of aesthetic achievement to symbolize its present emotional conflicts in order to re-orient itself toward "the real world meaning external and internal reality".

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

190 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1983

Reviews

[Tylor Lovins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I have read so far on dreaming, in terms of its potential value for psychological work and the psychic functions that give rise to dream work.

Meltzer relies heavily on Bion’s theory of thinking, his contributions to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, his organization of the Grid, and his explorations of the alpha function and beta elements of experience to explicate dream work and its functions. For Meltzer, at the core of dreaming is the processing of an emotional experience that is seeking symbolic form.

I also found very helpful the chapter on how Meltzer himself goes through a dream interpretation with his analysand. He relies heavily on the transference-counter transference relationship for exploring the meanings of the dream. He oftentimes arrives at a use of the dream symbols to talk about this relationship.

Very exciting book, I believe, for exploring the significance of dreams in psychological work, the analytic setting, and living one’s life creatively and as an individual.