Recommended Freud and Jung Books

No serious exploration of dreams can be undertaken today without at least a rudimentary understanding of the work of the great pioneers of modern, psychological dream interpretation, particularly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Freud's monumental work, The Interpretation of Dreams, rewards the effort of reading it, but a disproportionate amount of energy is expended on arguments with obscure nineteenth century scholars and psychologists who are remembered today almost exclusively because Freud mentions them. Fortunately, Freud himself saw the need for a more succinct and stream.lined presentation of his ideas. In 1901 he produced Uber den Traum, which is still in print today from W.W. Norton under the title On Dreams, in an elegant and eminently readable translation by James Strachey.

An old but still excellent book that bridges the gap between Freud and Jung through an intelligent blending of their insights is Erich Fromm's The Forgotten Language-An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (Grove Press, 1951).

Unfortunately, Jung's important work with dreams is not quite so easily accessible. His last collaborative project, Man & His Symbols, a dream-inspired book designed to bring his complex ideas to the general reader, remains the best overall introduction to his work, even though Jung died before he had a chance to edit and comment on the articles interpreting his ideas, which were written by his best, hand-picked students, colleagues, and proteges. The book has been care.fully designed with many colorful illustrations to have an aesthetic and emotional impact as well, so this is one of those rare instances where it really is better to read the big, hardbound, coffee-table version, published by Doubleday, and avoid the paperback reprint, from Dell Books, where the impact of the illustrations is all but lost in their reduction to the equivalent of black-and-white postage stamps.

Princeton University Press, in collaboration with the Bollingen Foundation, publishes Jung's Collected Works. From time to time, they also produce paperbound excerpts from this voluminous body of writing focused on particular themes and topics. The selected essays published under the title Dreams, in 1974, translated and edited by R.F.C. Hull, is an excellent overview of Jung's work and the evolution of his ideas about working with dreams. It is, however, somewhat heavy going unless one has a fairly clear grasp of Jung's work to begin with.

A number of books produced by contemporary Jungians provide a more accessible approach to Jung's ideas. Six of the best are:

The Meaning in Dreams and Dreaming by Maria F. Mahoney, (Citadel Press, 1970) (recently reissued)

Applied Dream Analysis: A Jungian Approach by Mary Ann Mattoon, (V.H. Winston & Sons, 1978) (also reissued in the past couple of years)

Clinical Uses of Dreams: Jungian Interpretations and Enactments by James A. Hall, (Grune & Stratton, 1977)

Dreams, Portal to the Source by Edward C. Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera, (Routledge, 1989).

James A. Hall has also written a shorter and more pithy book entitled Jungian Dream Interpretation-A Handbook of Theory and Practice, (Inner City Books, 1983.)

His more recent work, Hypnosis-A Jungian Perspective, (Guilford Press, 1989), also offers several interesting insights regarding the basic nature of the unconscious and hypnotherapeutic strategies for working with dreams.