FREUD: CONFLICT AND CULTURE

FREUD: CONFLICT AND CULTURE
Michael S. Roth, ed.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
274 pages, hardback, $26.00
ISBN 0-679-45116-I0

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, "is the founding document of a new scientific movement much as, forty years before, Darwin's Origin of Species was," John Forrester writes. Forrester, an historian at Cambridge University, is one of 18 contributors to Freud: Conflict and Culture, a volume of essays produced in conjunction with the long-awaited opening of the Sigmund Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in October.

Freud himself, reflecting on The Interpretation of Dreams 30 years after its publication, said it "contains the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make." He added, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

Freud's book, Forrester notes, is not only a scholarly treatise, but also a window into the life and times of its author. Dangling his own dreams as "bait," Forrester says, Freud entices readers to put their interests aside for a while and share his. In this way, he says, Freud not only instructs readers in the general topic of mental imagery in sleep but also shows them how to examine their own thoughts and feelings. "The interpretation of dreams," Freud asserted, "is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

The Library of Congress exhibit includes an original edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. It also includes an illustration from a comic book that Freud added to a later edition. "A French Nurse's Dream," suggests how dream symbols work and how dreams may protect sleep. It shows a young woman dreaming that she is taking a small boy for a walk. When he needs to urinate, she leads him to a place on the street where he can do so--and she can continue sleeping. His stream of water floods the street, growing deep enough to support a gondola, a sailing-ship, and then an ocean liner. Finally, the nurse is dragged from sleep by her young charge, calling her from his bed.

Freud: Conflict and Culture includes essays on other aspects of Freud's work, on the history of psychoanalysis, on Freud and feminism, and on Freud's legacy in popular culture.

The exhibit may be viewed at the website of the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov.