The Mindbrain and Dreams

Psychoanalysis in a New Key

by Mark J. Blechner

In The Mindbrain and An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation , Mark J. Blechner argues that the mind and brain should be understood as a single unit – the "mindbrain" – which manipulates our raw perceptions of the world and reshapes that world through dreams, thoughts, and artistic creation. This book explores how dreams are key to understanding mental processes, and how working with dreams clinically with individuals and groups provides an essential route towards achieving transformation within the psychoanalytic process. Covering such key topics as knowledge, emotion, metaphor, and memory, this book sets out a radical new agenda for understanding the importance of dreams in human thought and their clinical importance in psychoanalysis. Blechner builds on his previous work and takes it much further, drawing on the latest neuroscientific findings to set out a new way of how the mindbrain constructs reality, while providing guidance on how best to help people understand their dreams. The Mindbrain and An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation will appeal to psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cognitive neuroscientists who want new ways to explore how people think and understand the world.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

358 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2018

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, but reading it back to back after his earlier book on dreams, I was disappointed—he goes over too much of the same ground, sometimes even using the same examples.

The coinage “mindbrain” is meant to be a word conveying that mind and brain are two aspects of a single thing. Good idea in principle, maybe, but this particular one will never catch on. Maybe “brind?”