ABSTRACT
No book on analysis, repair and individuation can avoid a consideration of the way in which analysts can use their patients’ communication to them of their dreams and dreaming to increase their understanding of the dynamic process involved. They will be told dreams whether they ask for them or not, although the patients’ motives for telling them are likely to be extremely varied. Indeed, considerable advances in the understanding of dreaming and the use made of it in their patients’ communications are being made by analysts of all schools. Furthermore, outside the field of analysis, light is being shed by the sleep laboratory experimenters and by brain neurophysiologists on the nature and purpose of dreams and their possible function in the maintenance of psychological health, whether interpreted or not.
