Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan by Clarise Samuels (review)

of dream interpretation and the efforts he made to disguise this debt. The usual explanation for those efforts (to which Frieden devotes only one line) is that Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be accepted as a science, not dismissed as "Jewish science." What is new here is the claim that Freud felt an "anxiety of influence" toward his Talmudic precursors and wished above all to preserve his own status as an original thinker. If it were fleshed out more fully, this essay would be a significant contribution to the "historically informed understanding" of psychoanalysis called for by Frederick Crews (Skeptical Engagements [NY: Oxford, 1986] 47). The editor, Carol Schreier Rupprecht, rounds out the book's diachronic and cross-cultural approach with a learned article on dreaming in the Renaissance. She focuses first on the life and work of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), who is known today chiefly as a mathematician. After discussing Cardano's belief that dreams provide a kind of natural divination into the future, Rupprecht turns, via Foucault's Madness and Civilization, to a discussion of historical attitudes towards dreams. She demonstrates that the association between dreams and divination came to be replaced by a medical model that associated dreams with insanity and culminated in the work of Freud. Overall, this book is valuable for the questions it raises and for the richness of the material its contributors confront. Readers who are drawn to Jung's way of thinking about dreams will enjoy most of the essays here. Readers with an interest in other schools of thought (Freudian, Kleinian, Self-psychological, Ego-psychological) would do well to consult the important clinical articles collected in Essential Papers on Dreams, edited by Melvin R. Lansky (NYU Press, 1992). In any event, students of literature will sympathize with Rupprecht's open-minded appeal for further investigation of "dreaming's contribution to creativity" and an end to the domination of dream theory by "medical pathology or theologically (or psychologically) based versions of spirituality" (129).