Book Review

Few books can claim the status of Sigmund Freud's The interpretation of dreams. The record of a process of self-analysis, the book became the foundation for a new scientific methodology, therapeutic treatment, and cultural consciousness. In Dreaming by the book, Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer examine Freud's text as an open-ended, collective creation within the psychoanalytic community. As they explain, that communal effort became a highly contentious one. Their convincing perspective provides valuable and intriguing insights not only into the composition of The interpretation of dreams but also into the culture of Freud's book.

The authors chart three phases in the reception and revision of The interpretation of dreams. In the first phase, the book became a tool of clinical and professional training, especially among Freud's adherents at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich. At the Burghölzli, Eugen Bleuler and Carl G Jung used the dream book to assist in training psychiatrists in association psychology and in teaching them to recognize their patients' complexes. In the second edition, Freud accordingly drew attention to links between his own theories and the Burghölzli therapeutic approach. The book, however, never united Vienna and Zurich around a common clinical training or practice.

In the second phase of its history, the dream book became part of a strategy for Zurich and Vienna to cooperate in the field of applied psychoanalysis. In an illuminating discussion, Marinelli and Mayer examine how the study of dreams in both cities contributed to a collective exploration of symbolism, the results of which Freud incorporated into revised editions of the book. At the Burghölzli, Jung and his associates sought inner links between symbolic images and emotional complexes. In Vienna, Wilhelm Stekel attempted to create a popular dictionary of dream symbols. Freud's close Viennese follower, Otto Rank found in myth and literature parallels to dream language and images, and included an excursus on his finds in the dream book's fourth edition. The study of symbols became bitterly contested terrain in early twentieth-century scholarship. As Marinelli and Mayer show, the psychoanalysis of symbols proved equally conflicted, foreshadowing the ultimate departures of Jung, Stekel, and Rank.

During the 1920s, in its third phase, the book ceased being either a collective professional project or an organizational tool for the movement. Rather, through a growing number of translations, it appeared as the founding document of psychoanalysis and thus the necessary starting-point of its institutional history. During and immediately after the First World War, translators remained free to substitute their own dream material for Freud's in order better to explicate dream theory. With the effort to produce standard German and English versions, however, the original printed edition re-emerged as the authoritative text and Freud re-claimed sole authorship.

The appendices to Marinelli and Mayer's book include newly published letters from Bleuler to Freud, in which Bleuler describes his efforts to use the dream book as both a teaching tool and, less successfully, a guide to self-analysis. The supplements present two letters to Freud from his early Swiss supporter, Alphonse Maeder (one newly published, the other newly translated into English) in which Maeder responds to the concern, voiced to him by Freud, that members of the Zurich circle held anti-Semitic views. Finally, Rank's excursus on poets and dreams—removed from the dream book's final editions—is republished as an appendix. Thus Marinelli and Mayer present in both their text and supplementary material the vexed personal, intellectual, and social problems that remained attached to the spread of dream theory.

Freud never kept the original manuscript of The interpretation of dreams, relying instead on the first printed edition. That fact, cited by the authors, reinforces Marinelli and Mayer's approach to the dream book as a continual collective enterprise, and reminds us of the extent to which Freud himself saw dream interpretation as a never finished task.