Dream Watchers. A History of Modern Dream Research
This project aims to understand the rise of the scientific study of dreams in Europe and the U.S. after 1850. Whereas dreams have always been a troubling phenomenon for Western rationality, attempts at the systematic observation and control of the dreaming process only emerged in the nineteenth century. Within a new scientific culture of objectivity, dreams posed a challenge: since they appear in the sleeper’s mind as fleeting phenomena and can only be known after awakening, they could hardly be considered as observable objects; and more disturbingly, their irregular, immoral, and irrational aspects threatened the unity of the observer. This twofold uncertainty gave rise to a regime in which dreams and similar mental phenomena were objectified, a process in which the use of photography, and film, was of key importance.
The project analyzes the regimes of observation of dream research in three overlapping eras: during the first period, the dream becomes the object of a new regime of self-observation in which men of letters methodically record and collect their own nocturnal visions. In the second period, the research on dreams gradually moves away from the method of self-observation by placing the emphasis on collective and comparative studies, often with the use of statistics, and by a strong association with the physiological investigation of sleep. In this context, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) emerges as a distinct enterprise.
The method of self-analysis, the practical treatment of the dream as the dreamer’s recollection in shape of a narrative with the refusal of pictorial fixation, seems to set psychoanalysis apart from the objectifying practices of dream research. However, during the third stage, which sees the parallel rise of psychoanalysis within the human sciences and of dream studies within the sleep laboratory, various significant overlaps between the two fields can be traced.
By reconstructing the genealogies of the practices by which dreams were objectified during the past one hundred and fifty years, the project thus aims not only to bring to the fore the specificities of the cross-disciplinary field of dream research, but also to offer historical and epistemological elucidations of the current ambitions voiced by the exponents of new subdisciplines (most notably cognitive or neuroscientific approaches to psychoanalysis).
