Mark J. Blechner

Mark J. Blechner (born November 6, 1950, in Manhattan, New York) is an American psychologist and psychoanalyst. He has developed and researched new ideas in a number of areas: dreams, gender and sexuality, HIV/AIDS, psychotherapy and the interface between neuroscience and psychoanalysis (neuro-psychoanalysis). He has charted the patterns of irrationality in human thinking that characterize psychopathology, clinical neurological syndromes, dream phenomena, conceptions of gender, and prejudice.

Blechner received his doctorate in psychology from Yale University. His interests there encompassed both cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. His dissertation discovered that about 30% of the population cannot hear the difference between major and minor chords in root position, which may account for the relative harmonic simplicity of much popular music. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Blechner has identified certain unusual percepts, which do not strike us as bizarre in our dreams, although they would in waking life. In disjunctive cognition, which is common in dreams, two aspects of cognition do not match each other; the dreamer is aware of the disjunction, yet that does not prevent it from remaining. For example, it is common to dream something like "it did not look like my mother, but I knew it was her." Physical appearance and actual identity do not match. The perception of the identity of the person is disjunctive from whom the person looks like. In waking life, most sane people would assume that they mis-saw or misidentified the person, and correct for it, but not necessarily in dreams.

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