ABSTRACT
If contemporary Freudian and post-Freudian theory were to be seen through an intersubjective lens, then ‘Monsters, Dreams and Madness’ provides that lens. Bruce Reis gives his reader views into how psychoanalytic conceptions from the last century uniquely manifest in the consulting rooms of this century – how analytic technique has radically evolved through developing Freud’s original insights into dreaming, and hallucinosis, and how the presentation of today’s analysands calls for analyst’s use of themselves in unprecedented new ways. Taking up bedrock analytic concepts, such as the death instinct, repetition, trauma and the place of speech and of silence, Reis brings a twenty-first century analytic sensibility to his reworking of these concepts and illustrates them clinically in a process-oriented approach. Here the unconscious intersubjective relation takes on transformative power, resulting in the analyst’s experience of hybridized chimerical monsters, creative seizures, reveries and intuitions that inform clinical realities outside of verbal or conscious discourse – where change occurs in analysis.
