A Book Review and Discussion of The Necessary Dream: ?New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis by Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, presented by Mark Winborn, PhD

Civitarese takes the title of the book from a passage in Bion’s volume (p. 33), Cogitations, “the way in which the necessary dream is constructed”. The emphasis taken from this passage highlights the thrust of The Necessary Dream: how dreaming facilitates growth in the individual, how we ‘dream ourselves into existence’. In Civitarese’s post-Bionian model the dream becomes the vehicle to “develop the narrative competence of the mind. That’s why we say working with dreams and not on dreams” (p. xiii). Civitarese goes on to state, “the dream becomes the very model of thought” (p. xiv). These points of emphasis locate The Necessary Dream, and the role of the dream in analysis and psychological growth, squarely within Bion’s (1962) theory of thinking and the development of the mind.

A major theme in The Necessary Dream is the close connection between film, psychoanalytic theory, and dreaming. As Civitarese points out, film and dream are effective because “they are able to move beyond the ‘realistic’ illustration of reality, to get closer to reality” (p. 3). He also notes that editing a film is equivalent to the work psyche does in constructing and producing a dream, and also to the work of ? function. Throughout the book, Civitarese uses movies to illustrate the theoretical perspectives he is discussing, but he also treats movies and the characters in movies as cases, as well as using film to comment upon psychoanalysis. Civitarese also relies on film to illustrate and play with the elusive line between illusion and reality, history and construction, intrapsychic and intersubjective.

Another thread found woven throughout The Necessary Dream is Civitarese’s effort to restore emotional experience to the center of analytic focus, which is directly tied to his effort to re-establish the connection between body and mind. Civitarese puts forward, “the hypothesis that dreams are the connecting thread between the body and the mind, a way of giving back the body to the mind every night, of giving a personal meaning to experience and thus regenerating the psychic skin that protects us from the traumas of life” (p. xvi). Reading The Necessary Dream is not so much the acquisition of a set of techniques or theories, but a conduit to a deeper, more profound attitude in relationship to dreaming (both nocturnal and waking).