In 1899, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. In it, he meticulously records his own dreams and analyzes them using carefully selected biographical details. At the same time, he lays the foundation for an interpretive technique and cultural theory that is now widely accepted worldwide thanks to countless editions and translations. More than a hundred years later, the question arises as to how this classic author can be read against the grain in order to uncover hidden or repressed aspects of the history of psychoanalysis.
In his historical-philological essays, Andreas Mayer exemplifies the formative interrelationships between modern and ancient methods of dream interpretation, as well as the aftermath of Galton's composite photographs on Freud's analysis of dream images. He follows unexpected paths in tracing the famous Gradiva figure and the beginnings of free association in walking, as well as the contested histories of translation, in which the question of the untranslatability of dream logic and linguistic wit is at stake.
Non-fiction
Andreas Mayer, born in Vienna in 1970, has been Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) since 2014 and teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. From 2019 to 2020, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and since 2021 he has been working at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. He has published numerous works on the history of the human sciences and psychoanalysis, which have been translated into several languages, including The Science of Walking Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century (2013).
