Sharing Dream Things : Self-Analyses and Translations after Freud

Instead of understanding the relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the social sciences within a framework derived from psychoanalytic theory which presents the dream as an asocial and decontextualised object, this paper focuses on the practices of writing and reading which, since Freudian self-analysis, treat dreams as shared things. The first American translations of the Traumdeutung highlight the originality of the self-analytical model : Freud’s recommendation that the translator be an analyst who is authorized to replace the author’s examples with his own analyses implies that the author takes a back seat by allowing the translator to rewrite the book, at least partially, in his own language using his own examples. Even if it is conceived in institutional terms, the act of translation is not part of a logic of canonization of a definitive and closed text, but rather of a culture of self-observation where dreams and their interpretations can circulate as shared things.