Dreams in Myth, Medicine, and Movies

Shows how dreams have been revered as therapeutic tools, religious revelations, creativity catalysts, sexual symbols, medical miracles, instrospective insights and meaningful memories, or just dismissed as biological blips and even feared as signs of demonic damnation. Cinema–invented just before psychoanalysis formally developed–primed the public and scholars to rethink ideas about dreams. The author describes how surrealist artists purposely applied Freudian dream theories to their art to make the public aware of modern ideas about dreams. Most of our current cultural consciousness about the psychological value of dreams is traced to classical and contemporary cinema. This work examines how residuals of past approaches to dreams make conceptions of dreams in psychoanlysis and science more complex than ever today. Scholars and students in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, cinema, medicine, and religion may find this volume useful. The book also examines academic psychiatry’s increased emphasis in dream study on neuropsychiatry and psychopharmocology, as well as managed care’s decreased compensation for dream therapy.