Synopsis
Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900) began the modern study of a phenomenon that had fascinated humanity for thousands of years. This text, commemorating Freud's work, examines the shifting roles that dreams have played in 20th-century art and science. Over the course of the 20th century, as scientists have research the psychology and physiology of dreams, artists from Odilon Redon and Joan Miro to Jenny Holzer, Ingmar Bergman and Laurie Anderson have produced dramatic images centred in the unconscious. An exploration of this artistic output, this volume features colour and black and white illustrations depicting work by a broad range of artists in painting, photography, sculpture, video, film, performance, dance and other media. In her opening essay, Lynn Gamwell reviews the psychoanalytic understanding of dreams and explores the ways in which Freud's theories have been interpreted artistically. The next essay, by Ernest Hartmann, traces attempts to link somatic and psychological dimensions of dreaming and to discover parallels between these dimensions and creative thought.
In the final essay, Donald Kuspit assesses the impact of the transition from the mystical outlook that human beings held in the 19th century to the 20th-century scientific paradigm for the human mind. The volume as a whole seeks to act as a "dream archive" of around 500 examples of 20th-century art about dreams.
