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By a happy coincidence, Lewin's brilliant essay on Descartes' dream series appears in print at the same time as a hitherto unpublished study by Freud, which is also devoted to the interpretation of certain dreams from literature. In view of the tendency of some contemporary analysts to avoid the use of psychoanalytic tools in elucidating problems or topics of applied analysis, the simultaneous publication of both volumes at this time is especially welcome.
The story of the rescue and discovery of the manuscript is in itself worth recording. Written jointly by Freud and Oppenheim, one of the early if transitory followers of psychoanalysis, sometime between 1909 and 1911, the manuscript traveled from Vienna to the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Second World War, sojourned in Australia for some years after the war, and finally reached New York late in 1956. It was rescued from oblivion by the efforts of Drs. Bernard L. Pacella and K. R. Eissler and thus came into the possession of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Published against the background of these events, briefly outlined in Dr. Pacella's preface and James Strachey's editorial notes, the handsomely printed volume is indeed rich in content. We find in it Freud's original letter to Oppenheim (in facsimile), dated October 1909, the latter's collection of a series of dreams derived from various sources of European folklore and the former's introduction, commentaries, interpretative observations, annotations, and concluding remarks. The book contains the German version of the study as well as its English translation. The original is printed in the unedited fashion as written by Freud with all its characteristics as to orthography, language, obsolete spelling, etc.; the translation, though not reproducing the various dialects, adopts a conventional idiom usually associated with the wording of folk tales and on the whole succeeds in conveying to the English-speaking reader the peculiar flavor and 'spicy' q