| Dreaming of Footnotes by Paula Rabinowitz |
| In the concluding footnote that James Strachey appends to the second chapter of his English translation of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, entitled “The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream,” we learn of a letter Freud sent [six months after the book’s publication] to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess about a return visit to Bellevue, the house outside Vienna where Freud first dreamed of Irma’s injection. “‘Do you suppose,’ he writes, ‘that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house inscribed with these words?— |
In This House, on July 24th, 1895 The Secret of Dreams was Revealed To Dr. Sigm. Freud |
| At the moment there seems little prospect of it.’” (121) |
| This addition, by Freud’s English language guardian carries with it traces of Freud’s typically contradictory sense of his world-historic importance coupled with his equally pronounced fatalism about how his contributions to the science, and he believed he was making scientific history, would be received. At once boastful and self-deprecating, this footnote, added by his English-language interpreter in 1953—surely at the height of Freud’s influence within Anglo-American psychological practices—appears as a kind of playful mockery of the master himself. It concludes Freud’s long explication of his “specimen dream” of encountering his recalcitrant patient, Irma, in the midst of gathering that included some of his medical colleagues. As such, it establishes the theory and methodology for dream analysis: the need to dissect a dream piece by piece by—and this is key—the dreamer himself. [...] |
| NB: All citations are from The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900) in volume 4 of James Strachey, trans. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953). |
| Paula Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Minnesota where she holds the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities. Her books include Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism and They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. She writes and teaches about the interconnections among visual and sonic arts, narrative, gender and class. |
Excerpt from 'Dreaming of Footnotes' by Paula Rabinowitz. All text © Paula Rabinowitz 2007. Full Version can be read in the soon to be released Photography Class Catalogue. |