Walter Bonime's legacy: principal contributions

Walter Bonime is best known for his influential book, The Clinical Use of Dreams, published in 1962. Though Bonime embraced a neo-Freudian orientation, The Clinical Use of Dreams is remarkable for an absence of theoretical discussions, emphasizing instead a detailed practical approach, aided by illustrative vignettes. His particular emphases are on collaboration in the discovery of meaning and the importance of recognizing feeling representations in dreams. Further writings focussed on character disorders with depressive and paranoid symptomatology, vividly describing the typical underlying neurotic character structures. An outstanding article, co-authored with his wife Florence Bonime, criticizes the usual obscurity of psychoanalytic writings and suggests that conceptual abstractions be well balanced by clinical illustrations. Bonime's style is an exemplary model for such balanced writings.