Dreams in Folklore

Editor's Note

Träume Im Folklore

(a) German Edition:

(1911 Probable date of composition.)

1958 Dreams in Folklore, Part II, New York:  International Universities Press. Pp.  69-111.

(b) English Translation:

‘Dreams in Folklore’ 1958 Id., Part I, New York:  International Universities Press. Pp.  19-65. (Tr.A. M. O. Richards; Introd.J. Strachey.)

The present translation is a reprint of the one published in New York, with a few very small changes. The paper was originally given the Standard Edition reference number of 1957a and it has been thought best to retain this, though the actual publication of the paper was unexpectedly deferred to 1958.

The existence of this paper, written jointly by Freud and Professor D. E. Oppenheim of Vienna, had been in effect overlooked until the summer of 1956, when Mrs. Liffman, Oppenheim's daughter, then living in Australia, brought it to the notice of a New York bookseller. Soon afterwards the manuscript was acquired on behalf of the Sigmund Freud Archives by Dr. Bernard L. Pacella, and it is through his generosity, and with the unfailing help of Dr. K. R. Eissler, the Secretary of the Archives, that we are able to include the work in the Standard Edition.

David Ernst Oppenheim, Freud's collaborator in this paper, was born at Brünn, in what is now Czechoslovakia, in 1881. He was a classical scholar and became professor at the Akade-misches Gymnasium, a secondary school in Vienna, where he taught Greek and Latin. Dr. Ernest Jones (1955, 16) mentions him among those who attended Freud's University lectures in 1906; but his acquaintance with Freud apparently dates only

from 1909. In the autumn of that year he seems to have sent Freud a copy of a paper dealing with classical mythology in a way which showed a knowledge of psycho-analytic literature, for a letter of Freud's has survived (dated October 28, 1909)1 thanking him for it in very warm terms and suggestin