The Forgotten Language
Potpourri
by . Rinehart, $3.50.
Like Dr. Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and his Psychoanalysis and Religion, this “Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths” is a lucid exposition of psychoanalytic doctrine addressed to the seriously interested layman. The belief that dreams contain significant communications in sign language is as old as recorded history. After surveying the attempts at dream interpretation Ante Freud, Dr. Fromm takes a close look at Freud’s theory and Jung’s. He differs in part with Freud’s view that dreams are invariably expressions of the irrational (garbled wish-fulfillments of repressed impulses originating in infancy); and also with Jung’s view that dreams represent man’s highest intuitions, the wisdom of the unconscious. Fromm argues that dreams are expressive both of our irrational strivings and of our reason and morality; of both “the worst and the best in ourselves”; and he shows the application of his view to the interpretation of dreams. In the latter part of the book, Fromm challenges Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth, and he offers a new and provocative exegesis.