Discoveries in the Realm of the Soul
First Book: The Life of the Dream (Das Leben des Traumes) — Karl Albert Scherner, 1861
Karl Albert Scherner's Entdeckungen auf dem Gebiete der Seele (Discoveries in the Realm of the Soul), first published in Berlin in 1861, has never before appeared in English. Its first book, Das Leben des Traumes (The Life of the Dream), is the origin point of a line of thought that runs directly into Freud, who credited Scherner by name as a predecessor in The Interpretation of Dreams.
Scherner treats the dreaming SoulScherner's technical term for the dreaming self: not a synonym for mind or ego, but the deeper, image-making layer of life that continues working once waking thought and its logic have been suspended by sleep. not as a malfunction of waking thought but as a mode of life with its own laws, symbols, and architecture, most famously reading the dreaming body itself as a house. This edition translates directly from the 1861 Berlin printing, bypassing the twentieth-century clinical paraphrases through which most later readers have only ever encountered him at a remove, and preserves his original periodic sentences, his philosophical capitalizations of Soul and SpiritScherner's term for the more ordered, reflective faculty that recedes in sleep, distinguished throughout the text from the freer, image-weaving Soul it leaves behind., and the architectural metaphors that later readers of dreams would inherit without always naming their source.
For English-speaking historians of psychology and psychoanalysis, this is a primary text that has simply been unavailable. Restoring it is this press's flagship translation project: the will toward the good applied to a text, making Scherner's own argument answerable to the reader directly, rather than through a century of secondhand summary.
The translation itself is now complete, and its front matter is finished as well. Its back matter is roughly halfway compiled, with final formatting and editing still ahead before the edition goes to print.
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Even in itself, the life of the soul flows more mobile than the subtlest imponderable of matter; its force streams swifter than light, falls upon the being it touches more gently than light; in its most sluggishly moving waves it still flits more lightly than the zephyr. And yet, in the chief force of its evolutions, so far as it is waking, daytime life, it moves only heavily and in fetters; for the almighty ruler of the whole psychical periphery, the ego, holds it in bonds, and to everything that dares stir freely within it, it holds up the iron measuring line of category and the dry rhythms of logic, to march it into step. Only when, with the closing of the eyelids, leaden sleep falls upon the strength of the ego, overpowering and subduing it, until its power awakens again in the morning, does the fleeting, generative force become free. In dream, life flows freely; scarcely has the fettering gravity of the ego vanished than it shoots forth in a frenzy.
Berlin
Brandenburg, Germany
Karl Albert Scherner published Das Leben des Traumes at Berlin in 1861, when the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia. The press translates from that first printing.
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