| HERVEY DE SAINT-DENIS (M. J.L. Marquis d') |
Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger. Observations pratiques P., Amyot, 1867; . P., Amyot, 1867; in 8, 1 frontispice en couleurs, (2), 496pp., rel. postérieure, demi-maroquin havane à coins, dos orné de caissons à froid, tête dorée, (qq. rousseurs sur la page de titre, couverture imprimée conservée avec léger manque de papier en bordure et contrecollée sur un papier fort ancien monté sur onglet, petite épidermure en bas du dos, qq. rousseurs). Edition originale - Très rare - Exemplaire de Pierre SAINTYVES avec son cachet dans la marge inf. de la page de titre . The third great pioneer of dream psychology was the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denis (1832-1892). His book, Les rêves et les moyen de les diriger, published anonymously in 1867, is one of the most extensive and thorough studies ever devoted to the author's own dreams. It is also one of the most quoted but least-read books on dream literature because it is exceedingly rare. Freud stated that he had never been able to find a copy of it. The scarcity of the book is the more regrettable because it contains the findings of a lifetime of dream investigation by a man who opened new paths that few men were able to follow. His work was basic to the further elaboration of dream theory from 1880 to 1900 and still later in the dream theories of Freud and Jung. In the first part, Hervey de Saint-Denis tells how, as a thirteen-year-old boy, the idea occurred to him to draw a curious dream he had had the night before. He was pleased with the result and started an album in which he drew all his dreams. He noticed that he became increasingly able to remember them... He continued noting and drawing his dreams for the next twenty years. Hervey describes the successive stages of the training he went through in order to master his dreams. The first step was taken when, a few months after the beginning, he became aware that he was dreaming. The second step was achieved when he became able to wake himself at will in order to note interesting dreams. The third step was acquiring the ability to concentrate at will on any part of the dream that he wished to explore more deeply. The fourth and last step was the bountary directing of at least a part of his dreams. The second part of Hervey's book is devoted to a critical survey of previous dream theories, to which Hervey adds a great amount of material drawn from his own experience... He confirms Maury's observation that memory's part is far greater than we imagine... What Hervey calls abstraction and superimposition is what today called displacement and condensation. Conversation between several persons, another occurence in dreams, represents, according to Hervey, a conflict within the dreamer. Image-memories, however, do not account for the entire material of dreams, Hervey says. Creative fantasy also plays its part. Hervey emplasizes the imaginative dream performances... Still more remarkable are those dreams that would be called archetypal in Jungian terminology and that would actually seem, to the present-day reader, to be borrowed from one of Jung's writings... Whereas Maury had been content to experiment with simple sensory stimulation and the response to them, hervey imagined a technique of solidarité remémorative, that is, something similar to dream-conditioning... It is to Hervey's credit that he drew attention to the plasticity of the dream process... . (Ellenberger pp. 306/309)
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