Customer Reviews

Working the Nightshift: How to Understand Your Dreams

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This is not the forum for a discussion of ethics but Sabine Lucas's review must be challenged. Dr. Harthan celebrates the many benefits of dreamwork, yet recognises that there are potential risks. She agrees with the ethical position taken by the International Association for the Study of Dreams in that she supports an approach to dreamwork and dream sharing that respects the dreamer's dignity and integrity, and which recognizes the dreamer as the decision-maker regarding the significance of the dream. Systems of dreamwork that assign authority or knowledge of the dream's meanings to someone other than the dreamer can be misleading, incorrect, and harmful. I believe this woman seriously underestimates the ability of those wishing to understand their dreams. I won't be the only one who feels insulted by her patronising comments!

I sent a review several days ago and it has not yet appeared

This book is not out of print. It is available from the UK Amazon site and is well worth buying; it could transform your life.

This is a do-it-yourself book on dream analysis - a well researched and personally engaging one. It is clearly structured and carefully designed to provide the reader with all the presently available tools and techniques that are known to facilitate self-exploration through dreams. I was particularly impressed by the many perceptive and practical observations and suggestions that are scattered throughout the book, all of which are corroborated by my own professional experience as a Jungian analyst and dream interpreter of some 25 years.

However, the author is not a psychotherapist, which limits the range of her psychological experience to a certain extent. She therefore overestimates the average person's ability to learn the symbolical dream language without putting years of study and painstaking effort into it. She also overestimates peoples' capability to be "totally honest with themselves" - an important prerequisite, according to her, for a successful do-it-yourself dream analysis. This misjudgement of human nature appears to be at the root of her determination to send the time-honored dream interpreter packing and establish a new GOLDEN RULE OF DREAM ANALYSIS: "Only the dreamer can interpret the dream." Jung's life-long assistant, the late Marie-Louise von Franz, would have countered this with one of her famous down-to-earth statements: "You cannot see the [...]on which you sit."