Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images ― The Invisible Storyteller

Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller applies a contemporary interdisciplinary approach to dream interpretation, bringing cognitive anthropology, folklore studies, affective neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory to bear on contemporary psychodynamic clinical practice. It provides a practical guide for working with dreams that can be used by both individuals on their own and therapists working with clients.

Erik D. Goodwyn invites us to examine key features of reported dreams, such as the qualities of the environment depicted, its familiarity or unfamiliarity, the nature of the characters encountered, and overall themes. This method facilitates an understanding of the dream in the full context of the dreamer’s life, rather than interpreting individual, isolated elements. Goodwyn also introduces the mental process which orchestrates dreams, conceptualised here as the ‘Invisible Storyteller’, and explores how understanding it can positively impact satisfaction in waking life. As a whole, the book provides a collection of tools and techniques which can be referred to time and again, as well as a wealth of examples.

Exploring dreams as a natural source of clinical insight, The Invisible Storyteller will appeal to Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists, other professionals working with dreams with clients, and readers looking for a scientific approach to dream interpretation.

Erik D. Goodwyn is an assistant professor and director of psychotherapy training at the University of Louisville, USA. He has published on the dreams of soldiers in combat zones, on archetype theory and cognitive anthropology and folklore studies, on the psychology of rituals around the world, on combining depth psychology with symbolic anthropology, and the application of ritual theory to grief and mourning in clinical practice. His previous books include Healing Symbols in Psychotherapy: A Ritual Approach, The Neurobiology of the Gods and, with Susan Greenwood, Magical Consciousness: An Anthropological and Neurobiological Approach (all Routledge).