ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how Aleksandr Romanovich Luria's method of dynamic localization—which we are recommending is the natural method for rejoining psychoanalysis and neuroscience—works in practice. In order to lay bare the neurological organization of a complex mental function like dreaming, it is necessary first of all to identify the different ways in which dreaming is disordered by lesions to different parts of the brain, and then to subject these disorders to detailed psychological analysis. The loss of dreaming caused by left inferior parietal-lobe lesions is associated with the symptoms of left/right disorientation and finger agnosia. Loss of dreaming caused by right inferior parietal-lobe lesions is accompanied by deficits of visuospatial working memory. In the case of bilateral white-matter lesions in the ventromesial frontal region, psychological analysis reveals that loss of dreaming is accompanied by various mental symptoms, the most conspicuous of which is adynamia. Damage in the ventromesial occipito-temporal region results in a very strange syndrome.
