The Dream Book:
Freud’s Traumdeutung in the Web
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/d2/d2.id.project/d2.id.project.01.html

an application to
The Mellon New Directions Fellowships Program

Doug Davis
March 10, 2001

Project Summary. I am seeking support for a Fall, 2002, leave to complete the first phase of the major intellectual project I hope to accomplish before I retire. The Hypertextual Freud project for which I seek New Directions and Mellon leave support is the culmination of almost three decades of teaching psychodynamic personality psychology at Haverford. It is also the logical next step in my seven year love affair with the World Wide Web, an undertaking blending my humanistic and social scientific, my scholarly and my technological predilections.  

The project is the creation of a Web/CD-ROM hypertextual teaching edition of Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams," the ur-text of psychodynamic psychology and a work of continuing importance to humanists and social scientists.  My existing body of work on Freud -- several published papers, two self-published papers based on professional talks, and a considerable body of teaching notes on the Web -- is an adequate background for what I hope to undertake, demonstrating my close familiarity with Freud biography and early psychoanalytic theory.  The hypertextual project, however, is much too ambitious to be completed while I am teaching full-time.  I estimate that I can complete a draft along the lines that I outline by the summer of 2003, if I am able to begin preparing the project through Tri-Co Fellow support next year, and if I can secure a semester to work full-time during the 2002 - 2003 year. The project is “scalable,” in that once I have the overall structure in place I can develop it dream by dream – perhaps including student seminar projects in the semester after my leave. I hope to make clear below that this project has both great intrinsic interest and real value as an exemplar for scholarly/teaching use of Web technologies.

Fellowship Proposal. The Interpretation of Dreams stands alone in the history of psychology for its systematic statement and rich autobiographical illustration of a method for the study of the relationship of emotion to consciousness.  Freud himself identified this work, published in 1900, as his greatest, and noted that "insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."  Despite the importance of the work, however, neither within psychology generally nor within psychoanalysis proper has it been adequately understood and taught.  Some of the reasons for this become apparent as one reads the standard edition of the published work.  Freud's argument is novel, and he advances it fitfully in six chapters of expository writing.  His thesis is that, when it has been adequately interpreted by a means Freud uses his own dreams to elucidate, "a dream is the fulfillment of a wish."  Freud illustrates his method and articulates his thesis by means of a chapter-long illustrative treatment of one of his own dreams, and then by interspersing partial analysis of 50 others throughout the following five chapters.  While Freud's discussion is fascinating and has continued to provoke a secondary literature for 100 years, this specimen dream (of "Irma's injection") is in fact neither fully interpreted by Freud nor strongly supportive of the wish-fulfillment hypothesis.  Freud’s writing about “Irma” articulates many of the reasons for being dissatisfied with his explanations, yielding a text that is strikingly self-deconstructive and postmodern. Second-guessing about the real or fuller meaning of Freud's Irma dream remains a cottage industry in my field. 

What I propose is to take this dream text and its interpretation as far as possible on Freud's own evidence, offering the German and the English text of the dream in a hypertextual presentation that allows the reader/student to move back and forth between the phrasing of the dream as a sequence of images and discursive moves and the associated meanings Freud offers in his published account.  To those associations from each element of the dream, and to other aspects of the dream about which it now seems reasonable to surmise what Freud may have suppressed in his telling of the dream, I will add a second level of hypertextual links presenting in summary format the results of my own and others' biographical work on this critical point in Freud's life, and on the professional and personal circumstances around which the dream and its Freudian interpretation take shape.  Having followed Freud in using the dream of Irma's injection as a "specimen" of my hypertextual project, I will then move on to Freud's other dreams presented in the first edition of the book, arranging these in temporal sequence rather than according to the categories Freud imposes on them.  Each of these dreams will be seen in the context of the entire autobiographical picture Freud presents of his life in the period 1895-1900, and they will be found to constitute a rich web of meaning as they adumbrate, quote, and echo each other.  As the reader works through the hypertextual exposition of each dream, I believe the deep structure of Freud's hermeneutics will become apparent. I will illustrate this structure dynamically, by means of Flash and Javascript representations of each dream as a node in the network of associated themes they collectively constitute. The second-order nodes of meaning Freud reaches by reflecting on his own associations to the manifest dream are in fact the significant points in his biography during these years, as my linked quotation of that literature will demonstrate.

The result of handling The Interpretation of Dreams in this way will be, I am convinced, the most successful teaching text for psychodynamic psychology yet produced.  This claim sounds grandiose, and yet I believe Freud's enthusiasm for his 1900 book was in fact not misplaced.  The Interpretation of Dreams has served as a modernist classic for a century, even as it points us toward a postmodern psychology for our times. This method of interweaving Freud’s recalled dream material with its less than fully conscious personal context draws on the new informfation technologies with which I have been fascinated for a decade; and I hope with the completion of this project to approach an answer to the questions colleagues have asked so often of late, viz., “How does the Web/HTML presentation of an extended scholarly work fundamentally enhance its comprehensibility and usefulness? What is this technology good for in the liberal arts setting?”

There are several prerequisites, in my view, for me to carry out this project successfully.  For one, I need to return to the German language and complete both an academic course (intermediate reading German) and a program of directed reading to get me up to speed with the texts of Freud’s dreams.  Freud’s German style is original and evocative, and none of the existing translations is fully satisfactory. I do not, of course, expect to become a translator of Freud’s German in less than a year – merely a credible collaborator of such Germanists as may be interested in contributing to this work. My project will at least allow close cross-reading of original and translation(s), something both the student and the advanced scholar need. Further, since this work will require extensive quotation from published versions of Freud's work in both German and English, arranging copyright excess to these materials will be time-consuming, and perhaps difficult.  Sigmund Freud Copyrights was at the center of one of the most complicated and intriguing intellectual disputes of the 1980s and 1990s, as the works of Janet Malcolm, Peter Gay, and Peter Swales attest.  Freud colluded in the casting of his professional writing, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams, as a natural science, and he maintained a personal stature that cast long a shadow over followers and critics alike, as they have tried to imagine other ways of understanding his new psychology.  Every new interpretation and biographical deconstruction of Freud's core texts awakens anxiety in the psychoanalytic establishment, and fresh appraisals of Freud’s real value for our times are usually authored by non-analysts.  I hope to achieve a work equally useful to all sides. Much of the serious biographical work on Freud makes use of his unpublished correspondence and draft documents, and these have been made the object of byzantine procedures and restrictions.  I'll need to visit both the Library of Congress Freud collection and the Freud Museum in London to examine materials and to meet with other scholars interested in this work; and I would also like to consult with Freud scholars in Germany and Austria.  I have established a working relationship with Peter Swales, the most talented and original scholar working in this field, and he has expressed an interest in this project and a willingness to assist me with introductions to other workers. I am well read in the secondary Freud literature of the past 20 years, but I will need several months to review and extend my bibliographic work as it pertains to The Interpretation of Dreams.

My awareness that Freud's dreams could be presented hypertextually through the Web, and that this way of organizing my notes might constitute an ideal teaching tool, I date from my first year of experience with HTML resources for my Haverford classes, roughly 1994-1996.  The bare bones of what I now propose can be seen in the Freud dream materials linked to my "Foundations of Personality" and my "Freud and the Web" hypersyllabi on the Haverford Web server. I have been increasingly successful at interesting students in this way of organizing and annotating scholarly expository writing; and I see the use of this hypertextual “dream book” in a Haverford College classroom two years from now as my most attractive goal.

I will be working both with the original Freud readings and with the related biography during the next 17 months, but it is during the second year and the semester leave for which I am applying that I hope to be able to complete a working draft of the whole "dream book." It should be apparent that this project – while it requires expository writing by me of a type that could be published as a conventional, linear, essay – will require some combination of Web, CD, and e-book presentation. I plan both to do much of my own Web work as the project takes shape (I remain fully conversant with the technology and can consult with others about the technical requirements of such work); but I hope to interest a publisher in a commercial version when I have the core structure and several well-annotated dreams to show. The market for such on-line materials is rapidly expanding.

I will be 58 years old in April.  As I plan my teaching relationship with Haverford College in my early 60s and the continued pursuit of my technology interests as part of the College's technology oversight team, this culminating Freud project seems an ideal integrative next step. 

Bibliography and Linked Web Resources

Davis, D.A. (1990a). Freud's unwritten case. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7, 185-209.
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud_e.html

Davis, D.A. (1990b). Abortion and its discontents: Reproductive psychodynamics in early psychoanalysis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August.
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/fabort.html

Davis, D.A. (1990c). Writing Freud. transcription of Haverford College Faculty Research Talk, November 29, 1990.
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_writng.html

Davis, D.A. (1993). Accounting Freud: Review of The Diary of Sigmund Freud: A Record of the Final Decade. Contemporary Psychology, 38, 1315-1316. http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_diary.html

Davis, D.A. (1994). A theory for the 90s: Freud's seduction theory in historical context. Psychoanalytic Review, 81, 627-640.
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud90s.html

Davis, D.A. (1997). Oedipus redivivus: Jung in the Psychoanalytic movement. In P. Young-Eisendrath & T. Dawson (Eds.). Cambridge Companion to Jung. Cambridge University Press. http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/jungfreu.html

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/toc.htm
(Doug Davis's teaching notes on The Interpretation of Dreams: http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_intdre.html, http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_intdre2.html)

Note: The on-line version of this proposal, with links to the cited writings and course materials, is at http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/d2/d2.id.project/d2.id.project.01.html
My Web curriculum vitae is at http://www.uslink.net/~ddavis/d2vita.html