A past president of the Association for the Study of Dreams and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, Deirdre Barrett introduces and edits this collection of articles and inquiries into the nature of trauma and dreams as a window on trauma and its effects. Barrett sees this window not as a clear one, but as “prismatic, showing us a changed version of events that is frequently distorted but can also bring chaos into resolution.” (page 1). Seeking to combine the study of trauma with the study of dreams, all types of catastrophic events are examined. Contributors are among the best of the best and include Oliver Sacks, Robert Bosnak, Rosalind Cartwright and Patricia Garfield.
This book is divided into three parts: Dreams after Childhood Trauma, Adult Trauma in Wars and Natural Disasters, and Traumas of Normal Living. While perhaps better suited to the clinician or practicing therapist, any lover of dreams can find something intriguing in this material. Although this volume is not for those seeking a lyrical, creative or poetic approach to dreamwork, this is the stuff of life. These are papers presented with their statistical findings and conclusions, their subjects living and dreaming the grit, the pain and the horror, all that we most naturally could avoid and potentially repress. Within this collection, we recognize the universality of human experience, bereavement, life-threatening illness, divorce. We are shown ways in which trauma, including the horrors of war and the Holocaust, affects those who survive it, and further how dreams and our working with them have the potential to “restore the savaged” and to “give voice to the unspeakable.” (page 6)
