On Dreams, Edited by Arlene Kramer Richards

Contributors

Charles P. Fisher, MD • William Fried, PhD • Eugene Mahon, MD Edward Nersessian, MD • Arlene Kramer Richards, EdD  • Arnold Richards, MD • Arnold Rothstein, MD • Brent Willock, PhD

The dream is that nightly ‘state of the psyche address’ that presents us with our social emotional life in the language of metaphor. Arlene Kramer Richards, as editor of this volume, On Dreams, has brought our attention to the dream world once again. The chapters, written by distinguished analysts, take us back to Freud and beyond to consider the wish for immortality in dreams, the role of neuroscience in dreams, transference phenomena in dreams, and so much more. Eugene Mahon’s interesting article on the “dream-within-a-dream” becomes a subject of careful commentary for several of the other authors. Arlene reminds us of one of Freud’s most important influences, Artemidorus of Daldis, who wrote 1800 years ago and provided much of the basic structure upon which Freud built his view of the dream. Significantly Artemidoris saw the dream as pertaining to the future while Freud said it was based in the past and addressing the present. Charles P. Fisher describes the treatment of dreams among the indigenous Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon jungles. For the Achuar, as for Artemidorus, the dream is oriented to the future. Additionally, they see the dream “as more real than reality.” And finally the dream is not simply for the dreamer or addressing the analyst but is explicitly addressing the community and is in fact interpreted within a community setting. Brent Willock asserts that Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is “the most important book ever penned in psychology” but “it is not the last word on this subject.” Arlene Kramer Richards’s volume On Dreams confirms this assertion and gives us so much more to think about and, dare I say, even dream about.

–Daniel S. Benveniste, PhD, author of Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo (IPBooks 2022)

Dreams have fascinated dreamers for the 200,000 years of human existence on earth. Sigmund Freud made dream analysis a core element in his brilliant development of the concepts and techniques of a new discipline, psychoanalysis. In this noteworthy collection of essays by eight eminent psychoanalysts on dreams, we discover new perspectives, new insights, touching on the time-honored tradition of dream interpretation, understanding our earliest life, acknowledging a wish for immortality, retaining a sense of mystery in the intellectual milieu of psychoanalysis.

–Merle Molofsky, MFA, NCPsyA