Reviews
Anyone who thinks, writes, or teaches about dreams, and anyone who works with them clinically, needs to be familiar with this remarkable and engaging book. Mark Blechner's clinically based ideas about dream theory and the use of dreams in treatment are thoughtful, lucid, illuminating, and often startlingly original as well. The Dream Frontier will be taught and read all the way from undergraduate classes to psychoanalytic institutes. It is a contribution that will endure.
- Donnel Stern, Ph.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute
The Dream Frontier offers an exciting excursion into the synthesis of various disciplines: cognitive neuroscience, neurology, clinical psychology and psychiatry, and philosophy in the context of their history during the past 100 years. Blechner addresses his concern with the isolation between scientists studying dreams and clinicians interpreting dreams by challenging both to consider the many frontiers of knowledge currently involved with dream investigations...Blechner brings a broad intellectual scope to his various topics, using diverse, extensive sources and authors to compare and contrast approaches in developing evidence to support his themes.
- Paula Anne Franklin, Ph.D., Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
Blechner’s unique approach, which makes this book a gem, is that he writes as a practicing psychoanalyst who both trains students and treats patients, clearly conveying his intense personal enthusiasm for both. He is obviously a deeply reflective man who seems capable of admitting his own lack of knowledge and errors in judgment as he presents many useful clinical vignettes and engages in an ongoing dialogue with the reader. Reading The Dream Frontier makes on feel as though one is engaged in a complex combination of philosophical discussion, treatment, supervision, and general social conversation with the author. He makes use of one of the more endearing features of Freud’s technique of writing, whereby the reader is cast in the role of an interested skeptic and the arguments are directed to that skeptic. I wish more extant scientific writing used this approach.
- Stuart Twemlow, M.D., Psychoanalytic Quarterly
We are indebted to Dr. Blechner for the range, depth, and complexity of his comprehensive book on dreams. He conveys a deep respect for past traditions of dream interpretations with a balanced appreciation and openness to new ideas, particularly from the field of neuropsychology. … Blechner’s approach provides novel linguistic, visual, and scientific data that further expand our understanding of the drama presented by our patients’ dreams.
- Robert Gordon, Psy.D., Contemporary Psychoanalysis
With psychoanalytic virtuosity and a good deal of originality, Mark Blechner has reformulated dream theory in its relation to the evolving framework of neurocognitive research, neurophysiology, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In doing so he has provided the clinician with a wide-ranging and detailed approach to interpretive techniques. In 1953 Robert Fleiss wrote The Revival of Interest in Dreams to stimulate the flagging interest of psychoanalysts on dreams. Blechner's The Dream Frontier promises a second revival that now embeds the dream in the rich interdisciplinary matrix it deserves.
- Montague Ullman, M.D.
The Dream Frontier is an enthusiastic contribution, one that boldly but soundly embraces the contribution of other methodologies and lines of inquiry (Part II); elaborates clinical psychoanalytic wisdom, the author's in particular, about dreams (Part III); and asserts for psychoanalysis with refreshing confidence a leadership role in future integration of psychoanalysis and the cognitive and neurosciences (Part IV). …an excellent tour through the clinical domain of the dream. … unique and very exciting…splendid.
- Melvin Lansky, M.D., Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Remarkably comprehensive… rich and honest …This book is a major contribution to the field of dream research as well as to that of clinical practice. Mark Blechner has also done us another service in mentoring for us how a thoroughly scholarly and creative book should be written. He never bores the reader, taking care to inform him or her with playful caring.
- Leah Davidson, M.D., Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
Blechner illuminates many new perspectives on clinical analysis of dreams and on dreams themselves. He more than meets his objectives, and has written a book that should be required in any seminar or class in which dream interpretation and dream psychology are taught. His approach is precise and comprehensive.
- Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.