ABSTRACT
The reception history of The Interpretation of Dreams in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century is a story about an inquisitive and sceptical public, whose love and hate for the ‘Freudian’ adventure precipitates a new kind of self-analytical subject. This self-reflective subject is newly defined by the relationship between the dream and autobiographical revelation. As such it reminds us of Derrida’s seminal question about the curious origins of psychoanalysis and the oft-cited perplexity of how the analysis and interpretation of Freud’s own dreams comes to play such an important role in mediating the scientific, aesthetic and cultural domains of twentieth-century life. Derrida asks: ‘how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a world-wide institution its birth?’1 Or to reframe this more polemically, how did the autobiographical anecdotes of a scientist and a doctor inaugurate a revolution of the mind that significantly transformed the psycho-cultural life of modernity?2 For however we want to gauge Freud’s legacy – or the legacy of psychoanalysis or indeed the legacy of the dream book – there is no turning back. Even when we contest aspects of Freud’s ideas, as his early readers did, we do so from the point of having absorbed the Freudian legacy in all its complicated institutional, interdisciplinary and meta-textual contexts. As John Forrester reminds us: ‘There is something irreversible about what Freud has done to twentieth-century culture.’3
