Nocturnes, literally music for the night, is a delightfully
impressionistic investigation into everything that is not known,
and perhaps can never be known, about dreams. Rather than espousing
yet another strategy of dream interpretation, Lippmann proffers a
naturalistic approach appreciative of the playful, complex, even
zany creativity embodied in dreams. He urges us, that is, to
apprehend dreams on their own terms, in a manner that enables
patients actually to experience the unconscious in its radical
difference from waking thought.
Lippmann delivers on his agenda lightly, with a sense of humor
and practicality that will engage lay readers as well as analysts
and therapists. He takes up questions of general interest that
challenge us to reorient our thinking about dreams: How do children
learn about dreams and their telling? Why are most dreams
forgotten? How may we understand dreams about sleeping and waking,
even dreams about dreaming? And he reengages issues of perennial
interest to analytic therapists: dream disguise, dream forgetting,
the "companionship" of dreams, the neurotic dream expert, and the
therapist's management of his or her own anxiety when patients
report their dreams.
"Oh, I had a dream last night," the patient remembers. Too often,
observes Lippmann, this remark signals the beginning of an
unfortunate struggle, as the patient is called on to relate
something that changes when it is put into words, the analyst is
put on the spot to come up with an interpretation, and both are
asked to extract something immediately useful - and lately, cost
effective - from something that partakes of magic and mystery. How
silly this ritual is, Lippmann argues, and how alien to the nature
of the dream itself. After reading Nocturnes, no clinician, from
the novice to the most senior, will hear the words "Oh, I had a
dream last night" in quite the same way.
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