This book traces the history of psychoanalytically informed thinking about dreams, using selected contributions from Freud to the present to highlight both the legacy of Freud's "The interpretation fo dreams" and the evolving use of the dream as a research tool - of the mind first, later of the psychoanalytic process and of pathology and life predicaments, and finally as a tool to be integrated with other methods of investigation. "The interpretation of dreams" is largely based on conclusions drawn from Freud's self-analysis, and in that sense is a pre-psychoanalytic work. Its legacy includes not only the enduring insights that guarantee it a place in the history of ideas and put it at the very foundation of psychoanalysis, but also unresolved problems: the status of the manifest content; the role of the dream in context of the psychoanalytic process; synthesis and adaptation in the dream; object relationships and primitive splitting in the dream; subjectivity and self-states in dreams; pathology and trauma; anxiety dreams and nightmares, and, finally, the dream in modern sleep research. Progress and controversies in all of these areas are highlighted by the papers in this volume.
The contributors include: Sigmund Freud, Bertram D. Lewin, Ralph R. Greenson, Paul Redern, Erik Homburger Erikson, Erika Fromm and Thomas M. French, Charles Brenner, Joseph Weiss, Hanna Segal, James L. Fosshage, Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood, N. Lionel Blitzsten, Ruth S. Eissler and K.R. Eissler, Harold L. Levitan, Theodore Lidz, John S. Mack, Ernest Hartmann, Charles Fisher, and J. Allan Hobson. This book is intended for students and professionals in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.