Editorial

Author(s): Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper

Source: History Workshop Journal , Autumn, 1999, No. 48 (Autumn, 1999), pp. iii-vi
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289631

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 EDITORIAL

What is a dream? Is it an omen? A direct communication from God or from

the Devil? A psychic process whose interpretation provides the royal road
to the unconscious?1 How do different cultures interpret the meanings of
dreams and what might this tell us about the nature of experience and
understanding in times or places other than our own? Moreover, what
implications might awareness of dreams have for the conceptualizing and
writing of history itself?
This issue of HWJ contains the first part of a double feature on dreams
and their interpretation. If this is a new departure, it is also a continuation
of the Journal's long-standing interest in the vexed relations of the historical
and the psychological, and particularly in the methodological possibilities
and implications of psychoanalysis for historians.2
These dream essays will run across the Autumn 1999 and Spring 2000
issues of the Journal, thereby coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, a work that ushered in a new theory
of the mind and a new kind of investigation and treatment.3 By general con-
sensus, remarks Ernest Jones in his biography of the founder of psycho-
analysis, this book was Freud's most important work and the one by which
his name will probably be longest remembered. Freud himself memorably
declared that 'Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime'.4
There are many historical and conceptual questions to ask about Freud's
'dream book', of course. A vast and still-burgeoning literature is available
on the immediate pre-history of that epochal study, the familial, emotional,
intellectual, scientific and political factors that may have inspired and
informed the author/dreamer and his composition. The ideas, methods and
models set out in the intricate pages of Freud's text remain the subject of
debate and critique. Freud himself returned to the theme a number of times
beyond his initial pathbreaking study, yet by the 1930s it could seem to some
of his followers that the discussion was waning and the whole subject of
dreams was in danger of closing up and getting lost from view.5
In fact, as Susan Budd shows in her survey here of work on dreams, whilst
there may have been an ebbing of interest in some quarters, there have also
been important developments in dream theory and interpretative technique
within the history of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Moreover, what-
ever was going on in the profession during Freud's later years, elsewhere,
dream interpretation, with all its manifold implications for the understand-
ing of identity, had 'taken off', albeit into artistic experiments with which
Freud himself had little sympathy. Surrealism, for example, could not be
understood without an appreciation of its fundamental interest in the dream.

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iv History Workshop Journal

A cultural history of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams would necessarily

explore not only the ways in which it was developed or sidelined by psycho-
analysts, but also how it came to be studied, popularized, reviled and some-
times travestied in a plethora of subsequent accounts and representations. Its
impact on twentieth-century thought, cinema and psychology has undoubt-
edly been immense and remarkable, but as a number of the contributions in
the next two issues show, there is a vast hinterland of historical material on
dreams that has been less studied. Freud's account was itself shadowed and
paralleled by other traditions and approaches. A century on, how far does
historical research still support Jones's confident declaration that Freud's
main conclusions were 'entirely novel and unexpected'?6
Whilst not directly challenging Jones's assertion, Maureen Perkins's
piece on Victorian dream books illuminates popular conceptions in the
nineteenth century, exploring a tradition of dream interpretation which had
so often been the special preserve of women. Dream books were an import-
ant aspect of Russian culture too, and telling dreams was part of the way
people reflected on their loves or thought about fate. Faith Wigzell's essay
shows us what an important role dreaming and its interpretation (often in
a kind of reciprocal analysis, conducted over breakfast) played in Russian
culture and how, under the monarchy and communism alike, the very title
'Interpretation of Dreams' had quite different connotations to those we
associate with the so-called 'Freudian century'.
Dreams not only disturb our sense of time, but dislodge our sense of
reality and of logic, proposing new connections between the most disparate
events and states. Whatever the unconscious motivations, the underlying
dream thoughts that might be recovered through an analytic collaboration,
in the manner of Freud, it can appear in dreams as if anything is possible
and the world may take on the most personal and idiosyncratic of hues.
Nonetheless, dreams do not always remain individual matters. Jennifer
Ford's essay on Coleridge evokes the poet's tormented nights and his
attempts to understand and diagnose what was going on in him. This trans-
ports us into a very private world, but also into much wider aspects of
romanticism, medicine and philosophy of his time. The idea of the dream
as a source of creativity and catalyst of expression and artistic symboliza-
tion was the subject of increasing inquiry and reflection, as Stefanie Heraeus
shows us with particular regard to nineteenth-century France.
In certain historical situations, the visionary impulse has provided the spur
to movements of political and religious reform. Indeed, to envisage a differ-
ent future, to dream of a different kind of world, lies at the heart of the social-
ist and the feminist projects themselves. Perhaps the knowledge, conscious
or unconscious, of an 'alternative world', is central to the wider identifi-
cations that both make collective action possible and fuel the emotional com-
mitment they require. It was in dreams and visions that medieval religious
women gained a source of authority through direct connection with God,
beyond the structures of an institution like convent or church. But the
method to be adopted in historical investigation of dreams, modern or

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 Editorial v

pre-modern, is anyt
both the conscious
past dreamers, and the possibility of an unconscious dimension, without
falling into the wildest of "'wild" analyses'? Freud notably cautioned against
the enthusiasts who took too much at face value and who misapplied his
theories. He insisted that analysis could not be conducted without an
analysand; indeed, 'psycho-analytic intervention, therefore, absolutely
requires a fairly long period of contact with the patient'.7
Whilst there is no reason for dreams to be taboo for the historian, it is
surely the case that the recorded reveries and nightmares of the dead raise
a profound challenge and demand some caution and subtlety of approach.
Traditional methods are inadequate, yet new forms of inquiry are little
charted. If dreams can unsettle historical and methodological fixities, might
they also make it possible to experiment with approaches and materials
excluded from conventional historical analysis? The exploration of the life
and dreams of Arthur Tansley, a distinguished botanist and one of the early
adherents of psychoanalysis in England, shows how tantalizing such evi-
dence is. Although Tansley clearly accorded one particular dream immense
significance, determining his decision to leave Cambridge and embark on
analysis with Freud in Vienna, its meaning and consequences are debatable
in the extreme. Mindful of the methodological pitfalls of 'psychohistory',
and drawing on Freud's own procedures with tact, Laura Cameron and John
Forrester recall Tansley's curious adventure. Their article offers a new per-
spective upon the early history of psychoanalysis in England and suggest
new ways of thinking about biography.
How an individual's identifications can shape intellectual engagement
and political passion is also the subject of Anne Summers's essay on
Josephine Butler, the Victorian social campaigner best known for her oppo-
sition to the Contagious Diseases Acts. As Summers argues, a deep source
of Butler's feminism lay in convictions about experiential solidarity, a com-
mitment to and belief in the shared feelings of women. She linked her own
experience at the hands of the medical profession with what she assumed it
felt like for the Acts' 'victims' to be obliged to submit to medical examin-
ation for VD. This was a politics of the imagination as much as of experi-
ence involving a lively identification with other women, and it gave her
feminism not only an intellectual agenda, but a deeply emotional source. If
womanhood was an identification which lent Butler's politics passion and
force, manhood was an elusive object to which all parties in the Dreyfus case
of the 1890s laid claim. To a surprising degree, as Christopher Forth shows,
both those who supported Dreyfus and lambasted anti-Semites, and those
who were openly hostile to Jews in French society drew on Christian
imagery. In the ensuing polemic, both sides were involved in creating a sym-
bolic 'Jew' and casting their opponents as the reviled, non-male outsider.
Where Forth draws us back to that notorious rhetoric of race, sacrifice
and punishment in the 'Affair' that so deeply split French society in the
1890s, Stuart Hall offers a preliminary assessment of the social and political

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vi History Workshop Journal

implications of the Lawrence case that began with the murder of a black
teenager in Eltham, South London on 22 April 1993. Hall shows how it crys-
tallizes much wider processes and contradictions in contemporary British
society. A short accompanying piece by Keith Jacobs moves from the
general to the particular, focusing on the institutional factors that have made
the Brook Estate and Eltham itself a very particular kind of enclave. The
emotive power of the testimony in the Lawrence inquiry needed little trans-
lation for the theatre and television documentary/drama which ensued.
In a quite different context, a comparative essay on oral history by
Michelle Mouton and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick explores the problem
of testimony through material generated in Germany and South Africa,
respectively. They argue that it is at the point in the interview when the story
somone is telling breaks down, when difficult emotions surface and what
they term a 'boundary crossing' is reached, that a different kind of 'truth'
can emerge, often at odds with official or public narratives about the past.
Their concern with the dynamics of how people remember and the moments
when their narratives conflict takes us back to the questions raised by Laura
Cameron and John Forrester. How can we - as we must - move beyond an
individual's own account of their actions; and when does proper recognition
of the limits of our knowledge and interpretation require that we draw the
line and resist mere speculation? At the same time, how can we incorporate
a recognition of the forces of imagination, emotion and dream into the way
we write history? History Workshop Journal has always endeavoured to test
and cross boundaries. This issue, we hope, is no exception.
Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, London, Hogarth Press, 1953, 3 vols, vol.
1, p. 385.
2 See for instance, the feature series on psychoanalysis and history, History Workshop
Journal 45, 1998; T. G. Ashplant, 'Fantasy, Narrative, Event: Psychoanalysis and History',
History Workshop Journal 23, 1987; Ashplant, 'Psychoanalysis in historical writing', History
Workshop Journal 26, 1988; Carlo Ginzburg, 'Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes', History
Workshop Journal 9,1980.
3 Actually Die Traumdeutung made its first appearance in 1899. As Freud mentioned in
another paper, 'It was in the winter of 1899 that my book on the interpretation of dreams
(though its title-page was post-dated into the new century) at length lay before me.' Editor's
Introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, Hogarth Press, 1953, vol. 4,
p. xii.
4 Jones, Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, p. 384.
5 In Dream Analysis: A Practical Handbook for Psychoanalysts, London, Hogarth Press,
1937. 1961, p. 67, Ella Freeman Sharpe drew attention to an apparent falling off of interest in
dreams within the psychoanalytic tradition; cf. The following more recent observation on that
remark: 'the pendulum which [Sharpe] observed swinging away from psychoanalytic interest
in dream interpretation in 1937 has never swung back'; Sarah Flanders (ed.), The Dream
Discourse Today, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 1 (editor's introduction).
6 Jones, Sigmund Freud, p. 384.
7 "'Wild" Psycho-Analysis', Standard Edition, Hogarth Press, 1957, vol. 11, p. 226.

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