Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Dreams.

Abstract

This is the second volume of a projected series of four or more books from the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, headed by Anna Freud. A research group of 15 psychoanalysts and child therapists under the chairmanship of Dr. Humberto Nagera (the Concept Research Group) undertook tracing Freud's concepts. The reader is thus given a highly condensed, meaningful, scholarly, coherent, exhaustive, historical presentationm—in this volumem—of 25 important concepts from Freud's total work on the theory of dreams. No important concept is left out. We are able to follow the vicissitudes of their fate from 1895 to 1940 and to have a springboard for further study of the psychologic and psychoanalytic writers of the postfreudian era. Here are discussed such topics as affect in dreams, dream-work, symbolism, latent dream-thoughts, manifest content, dream censorship, condensation, displacement, secondary revision, dream interpretation, etc. Dr. Nagera and his co-workers have done in six long years a