Der Traum und seine Auslegung

by Medard Boss

Genres: Psychology

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist who developed a form of psychotherapy known as Daseinsanalysis, which united the psychotherapeutic practice of psychoanalysis with the existential-phenomenological philosophy of friend and mentor Martin Heidegger.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was read for the course entitled "Special Topics: Existential Psychology" at Grinnell College. The Psychology Department at the college was behaviorist in orientation so the new Department of Religious Studies was beefing up its enrolments by teaching the kinds of courses they wouldn't. A small group seminar, the primary instructors for this course were two temporary employees of the college who happened to have training in psychotherapeutics and an interest in, broadly, "humanistic" and, more narrowly, "existential" and "phenomenological" psychology. For this class we read a bunch of Sartre, Binswanger, Jaspers, Ellenberger and this book by Boss, a very close associate of Heidegger's. Inspired, I went on to read a lot more by those listed above, but no more full books by Boss himself.

[Edward Moran · Rating 3 out of 5]

First part is a critique of Freudian and jungian theory. He sees right through both of these gentleman. They are completely transparent to him and he is not a slavish disciple of either of these two men parroting the words that emanate from the messiahs mouths. Dreams are part of waking life he says. He doesn't divide into subject and object and need to "interpret" dream symbols into some abstract concept. Dream symbols are real. Will Durant has a nice comment about "physicians" offering cures since ancient times in his story of philosophy. Some people spend their whole lives in therapy confessing their so called "sins." As jung says in his psychology of the unconscious, constantly confessing ones impure deeds can simply be a way of avoiding the demands of nature. Nature before intellect,he says. Rest of book is boring survey of dream theories other than Freud and jung.