Dream Life

‘Dreams are my landscape’, said Meltzer

In this book, he reviews the metapsychology of dream theory through Freud, Klein and Bion and re-establishes psychoanalysis as the art of reading dreams, and dream-life as the core of mental processes. Meltzer views dream life as a continuum within each personality, of which the psychoanalyst is offered a privileged sampling, just as the child analyst is presented through play with a picture of unconscious phantasy life. Meltzer places the experience of the consulting room in the context of contemporary philosophical ideas about the origins and development of language. Dreams are not just puzzles to be decoded, the effluence of past trauma or future wish-fulfilment; they are the psyche’s attempt – with a varying level of aesthetic achievement – to symbolise its present emotional conflicts in order to re-orient itself toward ‘the real world – meaning external and internal reality’.