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Few of Freud's texts can have received so little attention or investigation as the 100 or so pages that comprise the first chapter of The interpretation of dreams
(1900), which Stefan Goldmann, a literary academic with strong Freud research credentials, considers still provides the best and most comprehensive introduction to 19th-century dream theories. It is immensely difficult to obtain a comprehensive overview of this forgotten tradition because there is no general outline of the field, which points to a further gap in research. What little there is consists in repetitive interpretations that the texts are no longer read in their own right and are given short shrift as precursors of Freud's work. The literature certainly contains no independent scientific or developmental accounts of the various lines of tradition or of the largely forgotten individual dream researchers who preceded Freud. ‘What we lack’, Goldmann concludes, thereby simultaneously defining his ambitious line of investigation, ‘is thus a history of science that would connect the history of theory and its reception with the history of individual scientists’. Whereas Freud explains the problems relating to dreams in thematic and topographical, rather than historical, terms in his text, Goldmann opts for an overview of different viewpoints. He examines 19th-century dream research (exclusively, it should be said, in the German language) predominantly in biographical, discursive and topographical terms. It is only a research agenda of this kind that will enable us to obtain a more precise understanding of what is actually new in Freud's dream theory and its specific starting point.
If we re-examine the alphabetically ordered bibliography of The interpretation of dreams in a chronological sequence, we can observe a clear intensification of scientific interest in dream phenomena in the 1870s. Between 1871 and 1881, a series of seminal works on dream