The New Psychology of Dreaming

by Richard Matthew Jones

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670005762
• ISBN13: 9780670005765
• Release Date: October 1974
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 221 Pages

Customer Reviews

Wishes become reality when you meet the right shaman.

Psychologist Richard Matthew Jones' book, "The New Psychology of Dreaming" has been out since 1970. In it he examines the rapprochement between the theoretical psychology of dreaming--a scientific event based on cognitive psychology, i.e., through EEG or electroencephalographic studies; and the applied psycholgy of dream interpretation (outgrowth of the psychoanalytic theory of personality)--a social event involving a person's response to his environment manifested through dreaming, which he then describes to an analyst. Jones says, "Dream interpretation is to dream psychology as engineering is to physics." Go figure. The author then offers this interesting proposition: "Dreaming is the augmentative response of the human psyche to the distinctive neuropsychological conditions of the mammalian D-state." Is Jones' book as great or influential as founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud's turn of the 20th century oneirological bible, "The Interpretation Of Dreams"? No, it is not, but what Freud, the Master lacked in empiricism (having only so much at his scientific disposal in his day, however, much of what he asseverated stands the test of time; see, for instance, the results of the Fisher-Greenberg Synthesis in Reuben Fine's tome, "A History of Psychoanalysis") because his findings were garnered from observations, hypotheses, analogies, assumptions and theorizing in his work with his patients, in and out of the clinical milieu, Jones completes by, if you will, marrying the lab to the couch. In fact, in the preface of this book, he poses this timely query: "What if I were Freud and could sit before an electroencephalograph...of neurophysiological patterns...direct correlates of dreaming?" He does just that and answers his own question with fresh and challenging, new theoretical material based on empirical insights delineating the difference between the heuristic psychoanalytic theories of dream interpretation and the new theory of dreaming. The Master who grew the tree would be proud of the way it was pruned. So, plant Richard M. Jones' masterpiece, "The New Psychology of Dreaming," on the threshold of your dream, today, because wishes become reality when you meet the right shaman.