*DREAMS AND HISTORY

The Dreams of the Dead

One of the features of the kind of detailed historical work evident in this volume is that, rather than helping us to avoid repeating past mistakes, it suggests that our mistakes-along with our achievements-are so particular that we probably couldn't repeat them if we wanted to. What we learn, rather, is to question any easy assumptions we may have about the universality of knowledge and experience. Here the topic is dreams, and the introduction and thirteen contributed chapters of the book present a fascinating and salutary array of ways in which dreams have been experienced, understood, and used over a period of almost two and a half thousand years.

The sequence of chapters in the book mostly follows the chronology of their subject matter. The theories, contents, and uses of dreams are considered in ancient and early Christian times, medieval times, early modern England, the Romantic era, mid and late nineteenth-century Paris, late nineteenth century England, pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, early twentieth-century England and Austria, and late twentieth-century and contemporary England. The exception to the chronological order is Chapter 2 by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis on 'How Freud wrote and revised his Interpretation of Dreams, which considers Freud's ambivalence about the subjective origins of his work in his self-analysis. This privileging of Freud's theory, reflected in the emphases of the 'Introduction', signals one of the aims of the volume, which is to celebrate and contextualise Freud's 'landmark intellectual production'. The broader contextualising involves looking at theories of dreams not just in different times but in relation to a wide range of disciplines and topics: religion, literature, the sociology of gender, art, psychical research, popular culture, and the history of science, as well as Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.

One of the chief interests of the volume is its drawing attention to 'the diverse dilemmas of psychohistorical and cultural historical methodologies' (p. 14). For instance, several of the authors grapple with the problem of how the reported dreams of people now dead can be used as historical documents. Can we learn from these dreams about the unconscious psychic conflicts of other periods? Can we know enough about the personal and social meanings of the symbols that appear in the dreams? What are we to make, for example, of the fact that in the ancient world a man's dream of sleeping with his mother was usually given an auspicious meaning (p. 40)? Is it valid to apply psychoanalytic notions such as projection, displacement, neurosis, repression, and the Oedipus complex to the dreams of people living in societies that may not suppose the kind of integrated human subject or psychic nature of desires implied by these notions (p. 43)? Charles Stewart discusses such issues in his chapter on 'Dreams and desires in ancient and early Christian thought'.

Acknowledging his divergence from Freud, he suggests that 'documented strategies of suppression do lead, over time, to the establishment of unconscious, embodied modes of repressive practice' (p. 41). It might therefore be possible to study the unconscious repressions of ancient peoples via their conscious suppressions. Other aspects of the problem are raised by Patricia Crawford in her chapter on 'Women's dreams in early modern England' and by Laura Cameron and John Forrester in their detailed account of Arthur Tansley's dream-inspired involvement with psychoanalysis.

Crawford's concern with gender issues is reflected in two chapters on dream books, Maureen Perkins's 'The meaning of dream books' and Faith Wigzell's 'The dreambook in Russia'. Both note that dream books were especially written for women and were used by them primarily to elucidate the future. Perkins suggests that a major part of Freud's achievement was to turn this around so that dream interpretation became a rational activity of greater concern to men and now aimed at elucidating not the future but the dreamer's past.

Another important issue is explored by Rhodri Hayward in his chapter on 'Policing Dreams: History and the moral uses of the unconscious'. He draws attention to the political and cultural assumptions of secular dream interpretation, such as the kind fostered by the founder members of the Society for Psychical Research in the late nineteenth century. The religious view of dreams as transpersonal, occult interventions provided dreams, so Hayward argues, with a revolutionary authority to which-dangerously, in the eyes of the conservative psychical researchers-a dreamer might pay more heed than to the established authorities of the surrounding culture. The SPR's statistical, historical, and psychological strategies to account for dreams-especially putative paranormal dreams-aimed to show that they were fully explicable in terms of the life history of the dreamer. This served to undercut the transpersonal authority that might be claimed for the dreams, to take the sting out of any radicalism drawing on this authority, and thereby to preserve the social status quo. Hayward's argument suggests how much more can be at stake in the interpretation of dreams than just the achievement of understanding.

These are just some of the stimulating ideas and arguments to be found in this book. Other highlights for me included Stefanie Heraeus's chapter on 'Artists and the dream in nineteenth-century Paris: Towards a prehistory of surrealism', Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper's brief interview with the Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal, and the same pair's insightful 'Introduction'.

One question the volume doesn't sufficiently address, surprisingly in view of its historical and contextual emphasis, is the extent to which the 'landmark' status of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams may itself be a myth successfully perpetrated by Freud and his supporters. Other historians of psychology have contended that neither Freud's choice of dreams as his subject matter nor his specific insights into dreams were as original or as revolutionary as the received accounts would have us believe (see, for example, Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 100-62). An extra dimension of interest would have been added if the present book had engaged more fully with this question.

Overall, this is a rich, scholarly volume that should be welcomed by anyone with a serious personal or professional interest in dreams, other forms of subjective experience analogous to dreams, or general questions of historical methodology applied to these areas.

Dr. Roderick Main lectures in psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex ans is author of The Rupture of Time - Synchronicity and Jung's Critique of Modern Western Culture.