Dreams and atrocity: The oneiric in representations of trauma

By Manchester University Press

This volume explores the relationship between oneiric and historical episodes of atrocity as depicted in transnational twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, film, literature and theatre. Examining the political and aesthetic power harnessed by dreams in increasingly ‘dark times’, it takes as its starting point the overlooked significance granted to the oneiric beyond Freudian psychoanalysis. By reading the oneiric within variously known cultural texts – including Holocaust fiction, world cinema, Bronx theatre, surrealist art and two collections of wartime dream transcriptions – the volume also offers a renewed perspective on modern and contemporary trauma. In so doing, it demonstrates the relevance of the oneiric, beyond the interpretative framework of psychoanalysis, as an aesthetic and political tool with which to alert us and respond to the violence of our contemporary world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526158062

Book preview

Dreams and atrocity

Dreams and atrocity

The oneiric in representations of trauma

Edited by

Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5807 9 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Odilon Redon, ‘Vision ’, plate eight from In Dream, 1879. Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Foreword: Dreams, trauma and awakening – Max Silverman

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reclaiming the oneiric – Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka

Part I Dream images

1Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity: Pierre Fédida and Georges Didi-Huberman – Nigel Saint

2Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France: Emil Szittya’s Illustrated Collection of 82 Dreams – Magdolna Gucsa

3Dreams and thresholds: The violence of doors that never close in Magritte, Kafka and Buñuel – Michiko Oki

4Condemned to oblivion: Concentrationary cinema and oneiric representation in Claire Denis’ High Life – Rob Hether

Part II Dreams as sites of resistance

5Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann – Sharon Weiner

6The Third Reich of Dreams: Resisting fascism through the oneiric unconscious – Emily-Rose Baker

7Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom: Dreams and the dreamlike in Pose (2019) – Lydia Ayame Hiraide

8Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peut-être (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg – Diane Otosaka

Part III Violent states

9Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine – Insook Webber

10Dreaming the unthinkable: The cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos – Christopher Kul-Want

11‘My hell dream’: Moving from trauma to witness in the nightmares of Bronx Gothic – Carolyn Chernoff and Kristen Shahverdian

12Shit, blood and sperm: The Nazi perpetrator’s hallucinations and nightmares in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones – Helena Duffy

Afterword: Archiving the oneiric – Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka

Index

Figures

2.1Emil Szittya, Dance, iteration of a composition reproduced in 82 Dreams, 48.5 x 64 cm, gouache on paper, signed bottom right. Courtesy of Fonds Emil Szittya. Photo: Bertrand Michau/Institut Liszt Paris.

2.2Black-and-white reproduction of one of Szittya’s paintings in 82 Dreams, 49.5 x 65 cm, gouache on paper, signed bottom centre. Courtesy of Fonds Emil Szittya.

2.3Emil Szittya, Street in central perspective, 30 x 44 cm, coloured pencil on paper, signed bottom centre. Courtesy of Fonds Emil Szittya. Photo: Bertrand Michau/Institut Liszt Paris.

2.4Emil Szittya, Street in central perspective, black-and-white reproduction in 82 Dreams, 30 x 44 cm, coloured pencil on paper, signed bottom centre. Courtesy of Fonds Emil Szittya.

2.5Black-and-white reproduction of Emil Szittya’s Town under air strike in 82 Dreams. Courtesy of Fonds Emil Szittya.

Contributors

Emily-Rose Baker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Baker completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Sheffield in 2021, where her research examined post-communist cultures of Holocaust memory from Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on her first monograph (Palgrave), and her research interests include Holocaust memory and representation, post-communist cultures, Jewish-Slavic relations, psychoanalysis and decolonisation.

Carolyn Chernoff, PhD, is a community-based educator, artist and sociologist at large. She is Graduate Faculty in Socially Engaged Art at Moore College of Art & Design, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Carolyn publishes widely on issues related to everyday culture, conflict and social change.

Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Professor of French at the University of Wrocław, Poland, and Fernandes Fellows at the University of Warwick, UK. Prior to her present appointment, Duffy was Teaching Fellow in French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, where between 2016 and 2018 she held the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship. Duffy has also lectured at other UK universities (Hull, Oxford Brookes), in Australia (University of Queensland, University of New England), and in France (Clermont-Ferrand). She is the author of two monographs, World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and The Holocaust in Postmodern French Fiction (Legenda, 2022), and of over forty journal articles, book chapters and essays. Her publications have appeared in French Studies, French Forum, FMLS, Modern and Contemporary France and Holocaust Studies.

Magdolna Gucsa holds an MA degree in Art History and is currently PhD candidate at ELTE of Budapest and EHESS of Paris. Her PhD research focuses on the relationship between art, social status and political engagement in the first half of the twentieth century, notably in the context of the international avant-garde through the life and work of an emigré writer and painter Emil Szittya. She is particularly interested in French–Hungarian artistic connections, as well as Eastern-European artists who worked in France, often referred to as the École de Paris.

Rob Hether’s research focuses on philosophy, aesthetics and issues of representation in French and Francophone science fiction. His interests include cinema and television, gothic horror, the Franco-Belgian graphic novel, and science and technology studies. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses in French as well as in Cinema and Digital Media.

Lydia Ayame Hiraide is a doctoral researcher in the department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her doctoral research thinks intersectionally about contemporary environmental activism in the UK and in France. She also has a background in literature and the performing arts, holding an MA in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent where she was a recipient of the Ian Gregor Scholarship. Lydia’s alma maters also include SOAS, University of London, Sciences Po Paris and the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. She was a co-editor of postgraduate literary journal Litterae Mentis (2020–1) and is an Editor of Politics (from August 2021–).

Christopher Kul-Want, educated in art history (Manchester University) and European philosophy (Greenwich University), is course leader of MRes Art and Pathway leader of MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Christopher has published widely on the subjects of French Romanticism, contemporary art and the philosophy of art. He is the editor of Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2010) to which Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a companion.

Michiko Oki is a London-based art historian and writer. Her research focuses on the representation of violence in the form of allegory and fiction in modern and contemporary art, culture and literature. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Literature and Art from University College London. Her recent publications include: ‘Hunchback as a Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art: Géricault, Dix and Salomon’ in Becky McLaughlin and Eric Daffron (eds), The Body in Theory: Essays After Lacan and Foucault (McFarland Press, 2021). She is currently a senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, and a distinguished assistant professor at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Diane Otosaka is currently an LCS Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, where she recently completed her PhD in French Studies. Her doctoral research examined contemporary French and Francophone Holocaust literature and explored questions of memorialisation of the Holocaust for those who come after this traumatic event. Her research interests include French critical theory, memory studies and trauma studies.

Nigel Saint is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published a book about Marguerite Yourcenar (Legenda/MHRA, 2000) and articles on Georges Perec, Louis Marin, Didi-Huberman and Pascal Convert. He co-edited Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader (Manchester University Press, 2013) with Andy Stafford and a special issue of Early Modern French Studies on Louis Marin (2016) with Alain Cantillon. He is working on a study of Didi-Huberman.

Kristen Shahverdian MA/MFA, is an educator, dance artist and writer. Kristen had a successful fifteen-year career dancing and choreographing prior to shifting her focus towards teaching and writing. She is a Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, and writes for the online dance journal, thINKingDANCE. She received her BA in history and dance from Hamilton College, her MFA in dance from Temple University and an MA in Socially Engaged Art from Moore College of Art & Design. In addition to writing, Kristen facilitates talks and workshops about the body, violence and witnessing in dance and performance art at educational institutions and conferences.

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of trauma, memory, race and violence. His book Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013) considers the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. He has recently published four co-edited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of the ‘concentrationary’: Concentrationary Cinema (2011), Concentrationary Memories (2014), Concentrationary Imaginaries (2015) and Concentrationary Art (2019).

Insook Webber’s doctoral thesis examined Paul Valéry’s work in relation to his contemporary thinkers, including Bergson, Freud, Sartre and Bataille, as well as his legacy as a precursor of the (post) structuralist notion of the death of the author/subject. Her current research interests include French literature since the 1980s and French cinema, examining them under philosophical or psychoanalytical angles. Besides book reviews, she has published research articles on Paul Valéry and Jean-Paul Sartre (French Studies), film director Bruno Dumont (French Studies), Michel Houellebecq (Australian Journal of French Studies), and Emmanuel Carrère (Études Francophones – forthcoming). She is currently probing Annie Ernaux’s work through the prism of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

Sharon Weiner’s research examines questions of language and trauma from literary and clinical perspectives. Her current monograph project focuses on the unsayable in works by Ingeborg Bachmann and contemporary post-war Austrian authors. A separate grant-funded study employs qualitative interviews with psychologists to investigate the nature of unverbalised trauma in a clinical context. She holds Masters Degrees in Public Health and Urban Planning, and has worked in early childhood health and affordable housing development. She is currently a Lecturer in German at Baylor University, and has previously taught at Emory University, University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul University and the Middlebury Summer Intensive.

Foreword: Dreams, trauma and awakening

Max Silverman

Our understanding of the relationship between dreams and trauma is, perhaps inevitably, filtered largely through the interpretive framework of psychoanalysis. We know that, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud attributed the repetition compulsion exhibited in dreams by returning shell-shocked soldiers from the First World War to the wartime traumas they had suffered. This was a development of Freud’s earlier work on dreams, dating back to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and before, in which Freud showed how dreams express, in a coded language and through a process of condensation and displacement of content, messages whose interpretation provides a key to the psychic activity of waking life.

Freud’s work on dreams and trauma was quickly exploited by the new art of cinema (which, in its Hollywood incarnation, soon became popularly known as the ‘dream factory’). In Léonce Perret’s Le Mystère des roches de Kador (The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador) (1912), the physician Professor Williams cures the traumatised Suzanne, who is catatonic and has lost her memory, by seating her in front of a screen on which the event that produced her symptoms (the shooting of her lover at the rocks of Kador by her wicked trustee) is acted out before her. Although the traumatic event does not return in the form of a dream, the filmed recreation of the scene creates a similar imaginative and mythical space for the dramatisation of the repressed moment. The classic Surrealist films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929) and L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age) (1930) (and, indeed, Surrealism in general), famously exploited dream imagery as a way of exploring desires and fears repressed in the unconscious. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Dr Brulov cures the ‘imposter’ Anthony Edwards of his traumatic past through analysis of his dream (acted out in the famous Surrealist sequence designed by Dalí).

Since then, the links between dream, trauma and psychoanalysis have become so firmly embedded in modern culture that psychoanalytic tropes are familiar in works that deal with the effects of trauma. If we limit the discussion again just to film, one thinks, for example, of Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008), in which the narrator/director retraces his own participation in the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon predominantly through a symptomatic reading of his own hallucinations and the dream of his friend and fellow conscript in the Israeli Army, Boaz Rein. In Shutter Island (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010), the suspense is largely driven by psychiatrist John Cawley’s analysis of the behaviour of investigator Teddy Daniels, whose hallucinatory flashbacks to when he was a US soldier during the liberation of Dachau play an important part in the plot. In his autobiographical film L’Image manquante (The Missing Picture, 2013), Rithy Panh uses a clay figurine of himself on the analyst’s couch as part of his exploration of the traumatic effects of the atrocities committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–9). In Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing (2012), about the atrocities in Indonesia in 1965–6, the recurrent nightmares of the mass killer Anwar Congo clearly invite a psychoanalytic reading. And in Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005), Georges’s dreams of blood, axes and sequestration bring back his (and France’s) complicity with the horrific acts of violence of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) that he has repressed as a bourgeois adult in Paris.

Psychoanalytic readings of dreams in cultural works are powerful ways to understand our belated response to traumatic moments and events. However, has the interpretive framework of psychoanalysis become so normalised in dream analysis that it is difficult to envisage other ways of approaching the relationship between dreams and atrocity? Are we so used to employing the psychoanalytic vocabulary of ‘repression’, ‘repetition’, ‘screen memory’, ‘condensation and displacement’, ‘acting out’, ‘working through’, ‘melancholia’ and so on, that we are blinded to alternative approaches to the oneiric? Let us remember that the wish fulfilment that Freud discovered in dreams was only another way of explaining the desires, fears, fantasies, dreams and myths that had been the imaginative bedrock of artistic works since the ancient Greeks (and undoubtedly before). And to what extent are psychoanalytic readings of dreams and trauma universally applicable, given that they may obscure the historical, political and cultural production of neuroses?¹

The novelty of this book is that, without abandoning psychoanalytic readings of dreams and atrocity, it sets out to explore other ways too of understanding the relationship. In their introduction, Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka suggest an approach that reads dreams not only as trauma’s coded language but also as an imaginative escape from and resistance to the oppression and systemic violence of what Hannah Arendt called ‘dark times’. Perhaps it was Walter Benjamin, though, more than Arendt, who removed the dream from the realm of the individual psyche (à la Freud) and placed it firmly in the realm of the collective unconscious (in this sense, Benjamin was more engaged with Jung than Freud).² In so doing, Benjamin politicised and historicised the dream image: instead of ‘Freud’s doctrine of the dream as a phenomenon of nature’, Benjamin posits the ‘dream as historical phenomenon’ (Benjamin, 1999: 908). For Benjamin, the ‘knowledge’ contained in the dream is latent and needs to be actualised. This is an ‘awakening’ through reading the dream image not pathologically but dialectically. So, in the phantasmagoric world of the arcades, Benjamin transforms ‘the enthronement of the commodity’ (Benjamin, 1999: 903) into a materialist reading of the capitalist machine. As he explains it, in the ‘second dialectical stage’, ‘the arcade changes from an unconscious experience to something consciously penetrated […] All insight to be grasped according to the schema of awakening. And shouldn’t the not-yet-conscious knowledge have the structure of dream?’ (Benjamin, 1999: 907). With Benjamin – and his historicisation of Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory – we can begin to explore the reversal of the terms sleep and awakening, as reality is the sleep from which we must awaken in order to encounter history.³

In their film A Perfect Day (2005), the Lebanese directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige use the delicate balance between sleep and awakening to dramatise both a symptomatic acting out of a traumatic event and the possibility of resistance and change. Malek, whose father was one of the 17,000 or so ‘disappeared’ of the Lebanese civil war fifteen years before (1975–91), has the sleep disorder sleep apnoea, or possibly narcolepsy, which causes him to fall asleep when he is not moving and interrupts his breathing while he is asleep. The strange movements (and lack of movement) of Malek’s body appear, then, to signal the unconscious and symptomatic response to the traumatic loss of the father and the haunting effects of the violence of the war on contemporary Beirut. However, beyond the belated and melancholic return of the absence of the father and the violence of the civil war, the liminal space opened up by the transitions in Malek’s body seems to signal something else too, which goes beyond this psychoanalytic reading. This is a space between ‘reality’ and dream in which the return of the repressed of the civil war intersects with the act (or at least the possibility) of awakening, the psychic state of the individual intersects with the collective unconscious of history, and the haunting nature of the past in the present intersects with the possibility of change and renewal for the future. As Hadjithomas observes (Hurst, 2013: 45), ‘we have to learn how to live in this state of haunting, while also constructing a different present. Our aim in this film is to place absent bodies next to bodies in the present that are about to wake up’.⁴

In their introduction to this book, Baker and Otosaka exhort us to think of dream as a site of ‘conceptual awakening’ in dark times. In the midst of ecological disaster, the proliferation of war zones and consequent refugee crises, new authoritarian and populist regimes and the evisceration of democratic rights and freedoms, new forms of racial and sexual oppression, and even the confinement of minds and bodies by the latest pandemic, this is a positive message for the future. This book certainly illustrates the emergence of demonic forces in dream; but it also shows how dream can be a powerful imaginative force in the face of those demons.

Notes

1See, for example, the critique by Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of what he perceives as the Eurocentric nature of psychoanalytic and psychiatric theory and practice and, hence, their limitations when applied to the colonial context.

2It seems to be a shared assumption, however, that Benjamin departed from Jung when the mythical aspect of Jung’s ‘archaic image’ underpinning his concept of the collective unconscious – as opposed to the historically materialist conception of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ – was critiqued in the 1930s by Benjamin’s Frankfurt School compatriots, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for its ‘fascistic implications’ (Wolin, 1995: 70).

3

The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream! – Therefore: remembering and awakening are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance.

(Benjamin, 1999: 389)

4For a fuller discussion of this film, see Silverman (2005).

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

Fanon, Frantz (2008 [1952]), Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press).

Freud, Sigmund (1961 [1920]), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis).

Freud, Sigmund (2010 [1899]), The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books).

Hurst, Heike (2013), ‘Rencontre avec Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige à propos de A Perfect Day’, Jeune Cinéma, 355, 44–7.

Oppenheimer, Joshua (2012) The Act of Killing (London: Dogwoof).

Silverman, Max (2005), ‘Latency in Lebanon, or bringing things (back) to life: A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige)’, Memory Studies, published online July 2021, DOI:10.1177/17506980211033333.

Wolin, Richard (1995), Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the Dreams and Atrocity symposium at the University of Sheffield in 2019, out of which the present volume was conceived – we are indebted to all those who participated. Special thanks to our contributors – without whom the volume would not have been possible – for their thoughtful chapters and willingness to engage in the editing process, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. We would also like to thank Max Silverman and Sue Vice for their encouragement and guidance, and Matthew Frost at MUP for his faith in the project.

Introduction: Reclaiming the oneiric

Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka

At night, in our dreams, we would go out

(Jean Cayrol, ‘Lazarean Dreams’)

What does it mean to dream in ‘dark times’? What becomes of dream experience, once revered as an imaginary intervention into the otherwise monotonous reality of the everyday, after modernity has ‘sapped all significance from oneiric life’ (Sliwinski, 2017: xviii)? What power might dreams harness in the current moment of late capitalism – that which teeters precariously on the border between somnambulant delirium and a 24/7 state of wakefulness – defined by austerity, environmental catastrophe and the persistence of racism and xenophobia? Adopting the phrase used by Hannah Arendt to designate political moments characterised by insidious yet often imperceptible mechanisms of violence, these are the pertinent questions posed in Sharon Sliwinski’s recent volume Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought (2017), at the heart of which is an examination of the political capacity of the dreams. Distinguishing between two fundamentally different yet equally political oneiric forms – the ‘dream-as-text’ and the ‘dream-as-dreamt’ – Sliwinski demonstrates the importance of dream-life as a means of challenging hegemonic power dynamics that manifest in events or systematic occurrences we can describe as variously traumatic or atrocious (2017: xiii). These oneiric paradigms – of dreamed dreams and representational dreams – also gesture towards the generative potential of treating dreams as underexplored forms of unconscious experience on the one hand, and of reading dreams within literary and artistic frameworks on the other. At this juncture, the present volume contributes to the rehabilitation of dreaming and the dreamlike in times of darkness, making a case for the diverse political as well as psychoanalytic uses of the oneiric by tracing it within, and applying it to, variously little-known literary and artistic representations of atrocity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

With this volume, we add to a modest yet growing pool of recent scholarship illuminating the currency of the oneiric beyond psychoanalysis only, reflective of a broader cultural shift in contemporary understandings of dreams and dreaming. Attesting to the value to be gained from cross-disciplinary approaches to the oneiric, dreams emerge as intimate cultural signifiers in Roger Ivar Lohmann’s study of dreaming and culture (2019), as expressions of historical trauma in Christiane Solte-Gresser’s research on dreams and the Shoah (2021), and as phenomena harnessing narrative logics in Simona Stano’s investigation of dream sequences in contemporary film (2018). Other works have treated dreams as acts of capitalist defiance, including Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) and Pavel Pepperstein’s essay ‘Postcosmos: Capitalism and Dreams’ (2005). What these works have in common is the idea that dreams offer a unique and characteristically other window into the personal and collective experience of structural violence – that which has long influenced a whole canon of nightmarish works by authors, artists and film directors, from J. G. Ballard to Ari Aster.

Here, we take a renewed look at dreaming within and beyond the field of psychoanalysis, arguing for the importance of dreams, not only in their capacity to diagnose modern and contemporary atrocity, but as authoritative yet elusive modes of witness, escape and resistance that carry meaning in and of themselves. By including perspectives from memory and trauma studies, cultural history, philosophy, sociology, art and critical theory, the present volume expands the parameters of scholarly inquiry pertaining to dreams to reflect the heterogeneity of the oneiric as an experiential and representational prism through which to perceive the world around us. Rather than proposing essentialising truths about dream-life, such an approach aims to illuminate a new set of questions for further investigation. What knowledge, for instance, do dreams impart or produce when viewed through a medical humanities lens? To what extent can the oneiric be reconstituted by this kind of interdisciplinary critique in the cultural imaginary? What can this tell us about the nature of dreams, trauma and the limitations of psychoanalysis? In probing these and other questions, the volume performs an intervention within conventional psychoanalytic understandings of the oneiric that have consigned dreams to the realm of the unconscious, and have continued to dominate scholarly approaches to dream-life since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899.

While trauma and atrocity are often used interchangeably, in this volume we distinguish between these relational terms in order to reflect their temporality as well as recent scholarly debates concerning the decolonisation of trauma theory. Whereas atrocity connotes an injurious act or series of events involving physical and/or psychological violence, trauma – while often manifesting physically, or stemming from physical harm – also relates to the residual psychic effects of the originary event. These concepts diverge in temporal quality: as trauma theory scholar Michael Rothberg puts it, ‘trauma’s conditions of possibility’ lie uniquely in ‘surviving the accident of the extreme’ to which atrocity refers (2000: 138). Our use of trauma alongside atrocity allows us to consider the longue durée of atrocity, as well as the ongoing, structural traumas that are irreducible to singular ‘acts’, and which stretch backwards and forwards in time alike. In this way, we are able to move away from what Stef Craps calls ‘event-based’ models of trauma that have conventionally dominated – or even ‘colonised’ – the cultural imaginary and which obfuscate enduring cultural traumas in the process (2012: 4). In the pursuit of a less hierarchical – or decolonised – form of witnessing, the present volume subjects to commentary and critique a range of atrocities and traumas, from the Holocaust (which has conventionally been treated as an ‘event-based’ model of trauma) to the often-intersecting oppression of Black, gendered and non-heteronormative subjects. While the scope of the volume stretches beyond the Holocaust, it is worth briefly attending to the recurrence of this event within each of the contributions described shortly. Since the Holocaust continues to loom large over the twentieth and twenty-first century as a modernising historical catastrophe, it is not surprising that fascism, Nazism and the attempted annihilation of European Jews reappear throughout the cultural texts foregrounded in the present volume – even those which, like Claire Denis’ sci-fi film High Life (2018), we would not immediately associate with the event itself. The prevalence of Holocaust-related trauma in this volume hence owes to the centrality of the event within the cultural imaginary, and the ways in which it has shaped modern and contemporary conceptions of trauma, memory and genocide since.

At the centre of this volume is a reassessment of the faculty and function of dreaming, which serves to illuminate precisely why the dream is uniquely placed to rail against, or indeed remedy, modern and contemporary trauma. A brief note on nomenclature here, and the conceptual differences applied to the dream and the nightmare respectively: while the conceptual slippage between dreams and nightmares owes perhaps to the speed with which dreams can morph into sinister narrative forms, the uncanny quality of the dream more broadly or the very resistance of dreams to be categorised, it is worth highlighting some of the (manifest, at least) differences between these oneiric technologies. Due to the centrality of trauma and atrocity to the present volume, many of the dreams analysed within the contributions are treated as anxiety dreams or nightmares, either explicitly or implicitly, due to the indelible affect they impart on the dreaming subject. In psychoanalysis, the distinction between non-traumatic dreams and trauma or anxiety dreams is particularly significant, impacting on the so-called ‘function’ of oneiric episodes. Dreams occuring in traumatic neuroses are considered belated encounters with death within conventional psychoanalytic readings, while dreams that are not traumatic in nature