Kirkus Reviews QR Code
THE SECRET OF A DREAM by Walter & Lucy Freeman Stewart

THE SECRET OF A DREAM

By

Pub Date: Jan. 31st, 1971
Publisher: Macmillan

Dr. Stewart is one of the few hard-line Freudians left and with Lucy Freeman as his handmaiden, this could not be otherwise -- a popular, expository, and earnest analysis of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams which appeared in 1900 and took eight years to sell 600 copies although earlier he had found the subject ""unworthy and trivial."" (Dr. Stewart did the earlier Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years, 1968, something on this order.) The dream represents both conflict and any ""unfinished business"" and following Freud's breakthrough dream known as ""lrma's lnjection"" which explained all his own self-doubts and recriminatory resentments of the moment, the dream became the medium through which not only the individual could be revealed, but also the source of the major Freudian tenets: transference; libido; wish fulfillment; Oedipal love/hate; primordial symbolic language; and above all the sexuality it expressed. Much of it in the light of later adaptive and reductive approaches seems oversimplistic (except to the authors) in an age which has fallen away so that even Dr. Stewart's attempt to validate this ""foundation of psychoanalysis"" is a downhill struggle particularly at this time of greater enlightenment, sophistication, and diversity.