Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis

289 Pages·2004·7.11 MB·English

by  Daniel Pick

Dreams and History
Dreams are universal, but their perceived significance and conceptual
framework change over time. Dreams and History provides fresh perspect-
ives on the history of dreams and dream interpretation in western culture
and thought.
Containing important new scholarship on Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams, and an exploration of subsequent psychoanalytical approaches,
this collection celebrates and contextualizes Freud’s landmark intellectual
production, whilst placing it alongside very different traditions of thought.
Drawing on recent work in psychoanalysis and history, anthropology and
art history, literature and history of science, it also discusses controversial
ideas about the role of the external world in the shaping of unconscious
mental contents.
In accessible language it explores the causes, meanings and consequences
of dreams, from Victorian anthropological exploration of ancient Greek
sources to peasant interpretations of oneiric life in communist Russia, from
medieval to modern dream narratives, from concepts of the dream in
sixteenth-century England to visual images in nineteenth-century symbolist
painting in France.
Dreams and History will fascinate those interested in psychoanalysis, art,
literature and myth.
Daniel Pick is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Cultural History, Queen
Mary, University of London.
Lyndal Roper is a fellow and tutor in History at Balliol College, Oxford.
Allie
Dreams and History
The interpretation of dreams
from ancient Greece to modern
psychoanalysis
Edited by Daniel Pick
and Lyndal Roper
First published 2004 by Brunner-Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Brunner-Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Brunner-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Copyright © 2004 selection and editorial matter, Daniel Pick
and Lyndal Roper; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict
environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dreams and history / [edited by] Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58391-282-7 (alk. paper) – ISBN 1-58391-283-5
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Dreams–History. 2. Dream interpretation–History.
I. Pick, Daniel. II. Roper, Lyndal.
BF1078.D735 2003
154.6′3′09–dc21
2003006202
ISBN 0-203-64697-5(cid:13)Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-67915-6(cid:13)(Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 1-58391-282-7 (hbk)
ISBN 1-58391-283-5 (pbk)
Contents
List of figures vii
List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction 1
DANIEL PICK AND LYNDAL ROPER
2 How Freud wrote and revised his Interpretation of Dreams:
Conflicts around the subjective origins of the book of the century 23
ILSE GRUBRICH-SIMITIS (transl. Arnold J. Pomerans)
3 Dreams and desires in ancient and early Christian thought 37
CHARLES STEWART
4 Interpreting dreams in medieval literature 57
HANS-JÜRGEN BACHORSKI (transl. Pamela E. Selwyn)
5 Women’s dreams in early modern England 91
PATRICIA CRAWFORD
6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ‘The pains of sleep’ 105
JENNIFER FORD
7 The meaning of dream books 125
MAUREEN PERKINS
8 Artists and the dream in nineteenth-century Paris:
Towards a prehistory of surrealism 137
STEFANIE HERAEUS (transl. Deborah Laurie Cohen)
vi Contents
9 Policing dreams: History and the moral uses of the unconscious 159
RHODRI HAYWARD
10 The dreambook in Russia 178
FAITH WIGZELL
11 ‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and Freud 199
LAURA CAMERON AND JOHN FORRESTER
12 Psychoanalysis, dreams, history: An interview with
Hanna Segal 237
DANIEL PICK AND LYNDAL ROPER
13 A dream to dream 247
EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
14 The shark behind the sofa: Recent developments in the
theory of dreams 253
SUSAN BUDD
Index 271
List of figures
5.1 Anne Bathurst (1707) 91
7.1 The Fortune Teller, London, 1890, title page 124
8.1 Jean-Jacques Grandville, ‘First Dream: Crime and
Atonement’, 1847 137
8.2 Jean-Jacques Grandville, ‘Second Dream: A Stroll
in the Sky’, 1847 138
8.3 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828),
‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ (Caprichos, no. 43),
1796–1797. Etching and aquatint; first edition, 1799 139
8.4 Jean-Jacques Grandville, ‘The Metamorphoses of Sleep’,
1844 144
8.5 d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, ‘Les rêves et les moyens de
les diriger’, 1867 145
8.6 Victor Hugo, ‘Dentelles et Spectres’, undated, Paris 147
8.7 Charles Meryon, ‘The Vampire’ (Le Strye de Notre Dame),
1853 148
8.8 Charles Meryon, ‘Collège Henri IV’, 1864 149
8.9 Odilon Redon, ‘There was perhaps a first vision attempted
in the flower’, 1883 151
10.1 The Interpretation of Dreams of Martyn Zadeka, Moscow,
1885, front cover 178
10.2 A Million Dreams. A New and Complete Dreambook,
Moscow, 1901 183
10.3 The Dreambook. 215 Dreams or the Interpretation of
Dreams by Various Egyptian and Indian Sages and
Astronomers, Mtsera, 1883, front cover 188
12.1 Hanna Segal, 1997 237
14.1 Salvador Dali, ‘The Accommodations of Desire’, 1929 253
14.2 Louis Umgelter, ‘Cerebral Palsy’, 1906 260
14.3 Man Ray, ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’, 1924 266
14.4 René Magritte, ‘Le Viol’, 1934 267
Contributors
Hans-Jürgen Bachorski was born in 1950 and studied in Hamburg and
Berlin. He became professor of German medieval literature at the Univer-
sity of Potsdam and worked on the romance of the late middle ages and
early modern period, on laughter and comedy, on the history ofmentalities,
and on the use of the ‘medieval’ in film. He died in 2001; his major study
on the poetics of the late medieval and early modern novel is currently
being prepared for publication.
Susan Budd is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She was
previously a lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics.
Her publications include Sociologists and Religion (1973) and Varieties of
Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (1977).
Laura Cameron is an assistant professor in Human Geography at Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Openings: AMeditation
on History, Method and Sumas Lake (1997): her work has appeared in
Histoire sociale/Social History, Native Studies Review, History Workshop
Journal, Psychoanalysis and History, Radical History Review and Histor-
ical Geography.
Patricia Crawford is professor of history at the University of Western Aus-
tralia. Her most recent books are Women in Early Modern England, 1550–
1720, with Sarah Mendelson (1999), and, with Laura Gowing, Women’s
Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook (1999). She is cur-
rently working on a book about parents and children in early modern
England.
Jennifer Ford, an independent scholar based in Australia, works on
Romanticism, poetry and history of medicine. Her book, Coleridge and
Dreaming, was published in 1998.
John Forrester is a professor in the History and Philosophy of Sciences
Department, Cambridge University. His publications include Language
and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980) and Truth Games: Lies, Money
Contributors ix
and Psychoanalysis (1997). His new book, The Freudian Century, will be
published by Penguin.
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis is a training analyst of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytical
Institute and has written widely on Freud and the history of psychoanaly-
sis. Her publications include Back to Freud’s Texts (1996) and Early Freud
and Late Freud (1997).
Rhodri Hayward is research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the
History of Medicine at University College London. He is working on a
history of psychiatry and general practice in twentieth-century Britain.
He has published on the history of revivalism, psychiatry and neurology,
and is completing a book on popular mysticism and the invention of the
unconscious.
Stefanie Heraeus is an art historian. Her catalogue and commentary on the
collection of paintings in the Staatliche Museen Kassel, Germany, Spätbarock
und Klassizismus, appeared recently. She is the author of Traumvorstellung
und Bildidee – Surreale Strategien in der französischen Graphik des 19.
Jahrhunderts (1998) and also lectures in Göttingen and Kassel.
Edna O’Shaughnessy is a training analyst in the British Psychoanalytical
Society, an editor of Melanie Klein and Roger Money-Kyrle’s work, and
an author of many influential papers on clinical technique. She is a trustee
of the Melanie Klein Trust and a clinical supervisor in child psycho-
therapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London.
Maureen Perkins, research fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Perth,
Western Australia, is the author of Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time
and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (1996) and The Reform of Time: Magic
and Modernity (2001). She is working on a history of stolen children in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
Daniel Pick is professor of cultural history at Queen Mary, University of
London, and a psychoanalyst. His work includes Faces of Degeneration
(1989) and Svengali’s Web (2000). He is completing a book on Garibaldi,
Rome and nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Lyndal Roper is a fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. Her publica-
tions include The Holy Household (1989) and Oedipus and the Devil (1994).
She is currently finishing a book on witchcraft in baroque Germany.
Hanna Segal was formerly Freud Professor at University College London,
and President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the author of
many works on psychoanalysis, including An Introduction to the Work of
Melanie Klein (1964) and Dreams, Phantasy and Art (1991).
Charles Stewart is reader in anthropology at University College London.
His publications include Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in