The Dream in Clinical Practice

This sourcebook presents theories on dreams, from the speculative and general to the more concrete and well-demonstrated. The essays place dreams and theories about dreams in full clinical context. Each author uses the dream in a creative way to facilitate communication between his patient and himself. As Greenberg and Pearlman point out in their chapter, "The Private Language of the Dream", the dream is used to help the patient make emotional sense out of his experience. Overall, the book aims to show how different clinicians have used the dream with different patients in a variety of therapeutic settings. The dream is presented as a flexible tool to be used in therapy, geared to the individual patient's stage of development, meaning structure and memories. This book aims to free the clinician from a dogmatic approach to dreams and encourage him to understand the patient's own unique dream vocabulary, made up of his personal experience and concerns.