The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road

Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2007
344 pp., illus. 8 b/w. Paper, $25
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4800-9.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Sigmund Freud, scientist and humanist, labored to treat dreams scientifically, and yearned to plumb and map the inchoate for therapeutic results. A conference was held at the University of Minnesota in 2000 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his book, The Interpretation of Dreams. This book emerged seven years later, an anthology of papers delivered there. They are well-chosen, and worthy of repeated readings and study.

Among the highlights, “Marx, Condensed and Displaced” by A. Kairina Kordela describes dreams as one more part of the capitalist era’s economic and semantic systems of exchange. She draws on studies of ideology and cultural studies to link dead labor and castration fear and to prod a trope of surplus value in psychoanalysis. If capital is the ultimate Jakobsonean signifier, then its flux and circulation condenses within dream work to create the psychoanalytic equivalent of its imagistic metaphors, images that have their own exchange value. And time is of the essence in dreams, where the use value of temporality will act upon subject identities “in whole-mind absolute synchronicity or [to] instantaneously coincide”.

“Young Mr. Freud; or, On the Becoming of an Artist” is by Klaus Theweleit, author of the memorable two-volume study Male Fantasies, which plumbs the constellation of fascist military motifs in Freikorps adventure novels. Here he approaches the various paths to the dream book and its long gestation from 1887 to 1899. Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fleiss led him to his theory of unconscious, and in his Dream Journal entry for July 19, 1883, he formulated the idea of conscious dreaming. He studied Charcot’s use of hypnosis in Paris, experimented with cocaine, and proposed it as a cure for diabetes, and a busy self-analysis all led to the individuality of his own practice. Thelewit reminds us that in Fall 1899, only 600 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams were sold. The essayist cites contemporary psychological violent processes used to give dreams a “kick in guts”. But preceding it all, he compares Freud’s encouraging mother, primal site of any man’s self-confidence, to the mothers of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. In a memorable simile, Theleweit compares the theatrical structure of psychoanalysis to Jimi Hendrix’s song “Are You Experienced?”, for dreamwork bathes the soul much as electric music bathes the body, to provide an inherently technological solution.

Two essays in the book investigate cinema, which flickers upon a public screen for collective production and an experience of dreams. “The Marnie Color” by Raymond Bellour notes how the color red is emblematic of trauma’s return in Hitchcock’s cinematic oeuvre, and lists red motifs of Marnie’s lips, gladioli, spilled ink, a jockey’s jersey and fox hunters’ jackets, sailors’ blood and stuffed exotic animal mouthparts in that movie. Hitchcock dismissed his movie, Spellbound (1945), in conversation with fellow director Francois Truffaut, as “just another manhunt story wrapped in pseudo-psychoanalysis”. In other films, Hitchcock said he felt “forced to simplify” any psychoanalytic aspect of the story. Bellour reminds us that Slavoj Zizek even wrote a book entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock.

Movie director Alan Resnais said that the technology of cinema is related to the destruction of the very past it seeks to recover. In “Other Languages: Testimony, Transference and Translation in Documentary Film by Jonathan Kahana,” we are reminded that the 19th c. photographer Felix Nadar yearned for a photographic document of speech with recording just as cinema was being developed, albeit silent film. But what exactly is silence, in verbally-effusive documentary cinema? In Werner Herzog’s 1997 film about the flier Dieter, the true story that Dieter is telling is glimpsed among the details. That dialogue is in no small part unconscious is a foundation of the science of psychoanalysis. One’s words can be a site of resistance to reason itself. This may be illustrated in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, where the supposedly dispassionate witnessing historical testimony reveals the unconscious contradictions of the interview form, where vision is often redundant in the enveloping bath of words. Film theory after the 1970s posited reality as something in opposition to the image and its central place in the spectacle, voyeurism and fetishism. To these theorists, a cinematic representation could only be a misrepresentation of the world. Among the pathologies hidden among words is psychic racism, people seen and not seen. Khana cites the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (and Max Julien’s film interpretation) personalities suffering the deformations of imperialism, as well as the decades of invisibility of blacks in the US documentary media outside of a few rigidly proscribed roles.

Laura Marcus’s essay “Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness” draws upon Siegfried Kracauer’s 1960 Theory of Film on dreaming. Wish-fulfillment is found in the dream sequences of early movies of Lumiere and Melies, which establish the equivalence of filmic and oneiric universes. Marcus finds it odd that—unlike Freud’s contemporaries Henri Bergson and Havelock Ellis—there is no reference to cinema anywhere in his theoretical work, though he talks in his letters about having attended movie showings. In other essays, Avital Ronell links Freud, Dostoevsky, and masochism, in a piece called “Insomnia, or the Dream of the Burning Child”. This book also contains the last work of the late Mary Lydon, the conference organizer, who previously had written on Samuel Beckett, and on the “French Freud” followers of Jacques Lacan. Like Sigmund Freud himself, the book has a wide-ranging breadth, conversant in the humanities, even poetry. The Dreams of Interpretation is a collection of fine erudite essays springing from The Interpretation--or should we say Interpenetration--of Dreams.