Freud on Holiday Volume I: Freud Dreams of Rome

Sharon Kivland

Price £17.50+pp
ISBN 9780955309205
Year 2006
Edition 500
Pages 32
Binding soft; sewn
Illustration 11 BW photographs; tipped-in
Dimensions 230 x 145 mm

Freud Dreams of Rome is the first volume in Sharon Kivland’s trilogy, Freud on Holiday; a series of experimental travel writings in which she re-imagines journeys made (and sometimes dreamt) by Sigmund Freud to European sites of archaeological importance.

Once a year Freud would go on holiday with his brother, Alexander. Using Freud’s published works and archives, Kivland has diligently established the routes and itineraries of three such holidays, and pieced together all the other historical traces of Freud’s thoughts and reactions during and surrounding each of those holidays and the experiences they involved. Each book in her series documents Kivland’s experiences as she re-takes one of the same holidays, in the twenty-first century, with her sister. Through writings, photographs, drawings, postcards and other fragments Kivland assembles books that work between traditional genres to produce a new kind of para-scholarly performance. Volume I contains an essay and a set of photographs – image plates that are introduced as ‘Freud’s holiday photographs’ and tipped-in the book after printing. Through these two dynamics, the book documents the sisters’ adventures as they follow Freud and his brother to Rome, a place Freud had dreamt about four times before visiting.

The text appears to be a conference paper, with sudden asides and peculiar distractions. The images are rather strange. They show no people. They are oddly cropped. They reveal only impasses, dark courtyards, angles of buildings. Their source is uncertain. Freud Dreams of Rome creates a space for its readers to take a dérive through Freud’s imagination as his experience of Rome shifts from the imaginary to the real: a shift from the longing he felt for the city whilst working on his seminal project, The Interpretation of Dreams, to his really being ‘there’.