ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the setting in which the analytic conversation takes place is designed to provide the patient and analyst the opportunity for dreaming in such forms as waking dreaming, "talking-as-dreaming", "dream thinking", and "transformative thinking". It explains the repercussions of the idea that the unconscious has not only a meaning-making function, but a truth-seeking function. The book discusses the source of the psychic death is very often a set of events in infancy and childhood that involved the experience of "primitive agonies" that were more than the patient could bear. The role of analytic theory varies greatly from patient to patient, and also from hour to hour, and minute to minute with any given patient. In the analytic setting, such a personality system is generated by the conjunction of the unconscious mind of patient and analyst.
