Dreaming by the Book: A History of Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychoanalytic Movement

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Summary: an indispensible guide to Freud's magnum opus
Review: There is a huge literature about Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. However, this new book - written by two young Austrian scholars - stands out as one of the most important recent contributions to the historiography of psychoanalysis. Mayer and Marinelli offer the first historical account of how "The Interpretation of Dreams" became the founding text of the psychoanalytic movement. The major virtue of their book is that Freud emerges less than the absolute master of his own text, but rather as a man who had to rewrite his book according to the embattled negotiations among the first generation of psychoanalysts. This process did not lead to a clarification of the Freudian theory (as a naive version of scientific progress would have it), but rather to a "Babylonian situation" in the theory of dreams. The major rifts described in the book are still with us today. Every reader of the Traumbuch will find in this book an indispensable guide.