Freud's Imagined Audience: Dream Text and Cultural Context

Abstract

Focusing on the - newly translated - first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, and on Freud's isolated position in the Vienna of the 1890s, this paper reconstructs the original audience to which the book was addressed. Through his repeated use of the first person plural pronoun ‘we’, Freud's argument appeals to the ‘educated layman’ rather than to any scientific consensus about dreaming. His aim is to create a new form of ‘hermeneutic community’ by appealing to intrepid spirits who are prepared to be guided by the ‘indeterminate’ arts of interpretation, rather than the supposed certainties of religious dogma or scientific proof. A close reading of the text shows that Freud's arguments are designed to appeal less to the ‘compact majority’ of Austrian Catholics than to the liberal Jewish subculture with which he identified, particularly through his membership of B'nai B'rith. This identification helps to explain his insistence that dreams should be interpreted as ‘texts’, even though common experience confirms that ‘visual images constitute the main component of our dreams’. Freud's techniques of interpretation are indebted to a specifically Jewish scriptural tradition, and he treats the revelatory potential of dreams with the attention traditionally devoted to a ‘sacred text’.