What is a dream?Dreams are universal, but their perceived significance and conceptual framework change over time. This book provides new perspectives on the history of dreams and dream interpretation in western culture and thought. Dreams and History contains important new scholarship on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and subsequent psychoanalytical approaches from distinguished historians, psychoanalysts, historians of science and anthropologists. This collection celebrates and evaluates Freud's landmark intellectual production, whilst placing it in historical context. A modern view of psychoanalysis, it also discusses the controversial idea of the role of the external world on the shaping of unconscious mental contents.In highly accessible language it proceeds through a series of richly illustrated case studies, providing new source materials and debates about the causes, meanings and consequences of dreams, past and present: from Victorian anthropological exploration of ancient Greek dream sources to peasant interpretation of dream-life in communist Russia; from concepts of the dream in sixteenth-century England to visual images in nineteenth-century symbolist painting in France. Dreams and History will fascinate those interested not only in psychoanalysis and history, but also arts, culture, humanities and literature.

Pick, Roper, Introduction. Grubrich-Simitis (Translated from the German By Arnold J. Pomerans), How Freud Wrote and Revised his Interpretation Of Dreams. Dreams and Desire in Ancient and Early Christian Thought. Bachorski (Translated from the German by Pamela E. Selwyn) Interpreting Dreams in Medieval Literature. Crawford, Women's Dreams in Early Modern England. Ford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Pains of Sleep. Perkins,The Meaning of Dream Books. Heraeus (Translated from the German By Deborah Laurie Cohen), Artists and the Dream in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Towards a Prehistory of Surrealism. Hayward, Policing Dreams: History and the Moral Uses of the Unconscious. Wigzell, The Dreambook in Russia. Cameron, Forrester 'A Nice Type of the English Scientist': Tansley and Freud. Pick, Roper, Psychoanalysis, Dreams, History: An Interview with Hanna Segal. O'Shaughnessy, A Dream to Dream. Budd, The Shark Behind the Sofa: Recent Developments in the Theory of Dreams.