Dreaming by the Book: F Reud's The Interpretation Of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. By Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer; translated by Susan Fairfield. New York:  Other Press, 2003,  264 pp., $28.00.

The Interpretation of Dreams is the canonical text for psychoanalysis. Indeed, the extent of its influence beyond psychology and the mental health professions is such that it may be considered one of the canonical texts of twentieth-century culture. Considering all that has been written about the book over the past century, is there a place for yet another volume, especially a volume with some claim to originality? The answer, in my opinion, is yes. Dreaming by the Book: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, by Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, is such a volume. The authors have relevant credentials to do this study. Marinelli is an historian and the Research Director of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna; Mayer is a sociologist and research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. They have together written a close history of the book itself, something that, as far as I know, has not been done before. In Science in Context (vol. 19, no. 1, 2006) they argue against the two common approaches found in the historiography of psychoanalysis. One type of history presents an overidealized version of Freud and his work; the other offers a tendentious, anti-Freud polemic, focusing on Freud's errors and questioning the validity and therapeutic value of psychoanalytic theories. Dreaming by The Book advances a new historiography, one that fosters a scholarly attitude toward questions about how psychoanalysis was discovered and developed, with particular attention to the relevant analytic texts and the discourse about these texts found in letters and other written exchanges. In “The New Freud Studies: A Historiographical Shift,” John C. Burnham (2006) maintains that Dreaming by the Book signals the arrival of a new