Source Material: Texts on Psychoanalysis and Dreaming

(some additional “raw” material may also be found in Supplemental Source Material; this page provides the main references used in the work’s compilation)

There is no greater value than going to the source texts when studying, and this applies to science, art, history, and religion.  If it all possible, for example, Freud should be read in the original German edition.  Not knowing the source language, then an English (or the primary language) translation for most of us is the proper approach.  However, it is also good to understand what others with a respectable lineage and education make of it, such as a historian or biographer who has studied multiple analysts and knows the timeframe well.

 

This last sentence applies best to the book, A Life of Jung, by Ronald Hayman, a biography but also a critical study, which neither glamorizes nor demonizes CJ Jung.  This, and other texts will be listed and some briefly discussed here.

 Textbook of Psychoanalysis 2nd edition, American Psychiatric Publishing, 2012

Getting to the Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 2nd edition, this was chosen as perhaps the most definitive one volume examination of the critical foundation of the 110+ years of the field, and a look at contemporary currents in several different areas.

In many ways, it seems lacking.  Appearances can be deceiving.  Large and heavy as most medical textbooks, it lacks however in diagrams and photographs, relying on two column per page chapters contributed by different authors.  Some chapters are simply outstanding, and others of little appeal, although their value depends largely on the interest of the reader.  One of the best chapters, “Freud and His Circle,” by Daria Colombo, presents likely the most significant condensation of a large body or work and theories, in a manner that each sentence in every paragraph can not be too quickly read.  Freud’s writing was typically long and drawn out, an example is Dora, but he was anything but making a point once and simply supporting it with examples.  Rather, Freud would write the same substance, time and time again, in only slightly varying ways, to the point of annoyance, though anyone who can be patient with a writer like Marcel Proust may enjoy it.

Colombo is the exact opposite with his subject’s style, and it is worth reading this chapter and enjoying some direct to the substance writing.  An expensive text, but full of authoritative information, well backed by references, training, and experience, that there appears no other single reference on the 115 (or so) year history of psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on current technique and its relationships to its founder and followers.

Particularly worthwhile is the material on transference and countertransference, and the many aspects of the analyst- anaylsand relationship.  Nothing appears to fascinate a psychiatrist so much as his own mind, and in the countertransference, patients may  project their own fantasies and perceptions onto their analyst.  Transferance and countertransference will be discussed more in its own page, as they relate to dream analysis.

(I admit to an earlier bias towards medically trained therapists, however this has been muted by certain trends in the profession.  This text contains many chapters by doctors of philosophy as well as physicians, and there is an overall balance between psychiatry and psychology in the authorship of the text.  Even the “traditional” difference regarding drugs,  whereby only a M.D. may prescribe medicine, has been denied in recent years by granting that ability to clinical psychologists, practicing nurses, and other regulated and certified healthcare workers.)

Recommended Direct Sources for Study and Reference:

     By CJ Jung, published as Bollinger Series by Princeton University, and translated   by RFC Hull, unless otherwise noted:

Dreams

Psychological Types

The Practice of Psychotherapy

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Aion

Psychology and Religion: West and East

The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease

Man and His Symbols (Dell)

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Vintage)

The Red Book

     By Sigmund Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams (Hogarth)

1st publication, 1899, image from Wikipedia

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Macmillian Collier)

The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Norton)

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Hogarth)

     By Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Snow Lion )

Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of Dzogchen (Snow Lion)

Dream Yoga Visualization Card Set (Ligmincha Institute)

     By Horwitz and Wakefield

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive  Disorder (Oxford)

       By Thomas Ogden

This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries

examines the role of dreaming in psychology, building on ideas from Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott,   and postulates that psychopathology results from  a breakdown in one’s capacity to dream their experience.

The text follows on an earlier journal publication by Ogden:

Int J Psychoanal. 2004 Aug;85(Pt 4):857-77. This art of psychoanalysis. Dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries. Ogden TH. Source 306 Laurel St, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA.

From the abstract in NIH Pubmed: “each analysand unconsciously (and ambivalently) is seeking help in dreaming his ‘night terrors’ (his undreamt and undreamable dreams) and his ‘nightmares’ (his dreams that are interrupted when the pain of the emotional experience being dreamt exceeds his capacity for dreaming). Undreamable dreams are understood as manifestations of psychotic and psychically foreclosed aspects of the personality; interrupted dreams are viewed as reflections of neurotic and other non-psychotic parts of the personality. The analyst’s task is to generate conditions that may allow the analysand–with the analyst’s participation–to dream the patient’s previously undreamable and interrupted dreams.” 

(More “raw” notes are found in the supplemental material.)

Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works  TH Ogden  2012

 

 

Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting  TH Ogden 2008

       By Chogyal Namkhai Norbu

Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (Snow Lion)

      By Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche

The Practice of Mahamudra (Snow Lion)

       By Lama Surya Das

Natural Radiance: Awakening to your Great Perfection (Sounds True)

By Peter Washington (for creative relaxation, a collection of poems)

    Poems of Sleep and Dreams (Knopf Everyman)

The following texts are relevant to the papers on Jaynes and Ethology:

    by Julian Jaynes- The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind

     by Desmond Morris-  The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal

     by Richard Dawkins- The Selfish Gene

     by Jared Diamond- Natural Experiments of History,  Collapse: How Societies Choose to                                      Fail or Succeed

     by Ernest Mayr- The Growth of Biological Thought

     by Mayr and Diamond- The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, and                  Biogeography

     by  Marcel Kuijsten- Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s                      Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited

by Yosuke Yanase- http://yosukeyanase.blogspot.com/2010/03/consciousness-according-to-julian.html

by Princeton University- http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/97/q4/1125-jaynes.html

By way of NIH PubMed, as indexed for MEDLINE.  (PMID: 17509238)

Funct Neurol. 2007 Jan-Apr;22(1):11-5.  The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, by Cavanna AE, Trimble M, Cinti F, Monaco F.