Despite the early interest of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, posttraumatic nightmares have long been exempt from psychodynamic investigation. The neglect is accounted for by one simple reason: posttraumatic nightmares have not been viewed as psychodynamic events at all. Rather, they have been assumed to be literal replays of a trauma to which the dreamer was subjected; in Freud's terms, such nightmares have been understood as simple "manifest content" lacking any latent meaning. In Posttraumatic Nightmares: Psychodynamic Explorations, Melvin Lansky challenges this long-accepted view in the first comprehensive study of posttraumatic nightmares as true mental products rather than signs of a posttraumatic reaction.