{"id":79,"date":"2015-04-09T14:39:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T14:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/?p=79"},"modified":"2015-04-09T14:39:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T14:39:19","slug":"fairbairns-dream-drawings-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/2015\/04\/09\/fairbairns-dream-drawings-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairbairn’s Dream Drawings #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

The composition of the Fairbairn Archive is rich, with a wide variety of materials\u00a0from manuscripts\u00a0to\u00a0typescripts\u00a0and\u00a0photographs to correspondence. However, amongst the most striking of all\u00a0the documents\u00a0are a collection of dream drawings, made by Ronald Fairbairn in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Dreams have an important role to play when it comes to psychoanalysis. Alongside the exploration of fantasy and free-association, dreams offer\u00a0analysts a means to\u00a0gain insight into a patient’s symptoms and problems.\u00a0Fairbairn made use of this technique when working with his own patients, but as these drawings reveal, he was also keen to record and analyse his own dreams.<\/p>\n

That Fairbairn would be open to such self-analysis is no real surprise. Practitioners\u00a0of Fairbairn’s generation were expected to undergo\u00a0analysis\u00a0as part of their training and in\u00a01921,\u00a0Fairbairn went into treatment with the analyst, E. H. Connell. With his obvious interest in the human psyche, understanding himself would be yet another means of furthering his knowledge\u00a0of this complex subject.<\/p>\n

Fairbairn’s dream drawings are, typically, simple line-drawings in pen, on lined paper. They give the impression of being made in haste, made as an aide-memoir rather than for any\u00a0artistic purposes. There are recurring themes, recurring characters but much of the meaning is obscure and difficult to interpret.<\/p>\n

For my first visit to this subject I have chosen a selection of images united by their depiction of landscape.<\/p>\n

\"landscape<\/a>
\n<\/a>Symbols of hills, valleys, coasts and water, as seen above, are recurrent in Fairbairn’s\u00a0dream drawings, particularly those made in October, 1950.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

They are often devoid of people, although there are occasional exceptions, such as the drawing below.<\/p>\n

\"landscape<\/a><\/p>\n

And\u00a0although\u00a0most of the dream drawings depict\u00a0plausible scenarios, there are\u00a0occasional forays into the world of the supernatural, or at least the unusual, such as in the drawing below.<\/p>\n

\"landscape<\/a><\/p>\n

These drawings offer an extremely intimate window into the mind of Ronald Fairbairn. Researchers of archives most often need to make inferences from the documentary remains in order to be able to get this close to their subjects. The Fairbairn Archive is special because material of this nature is tantalisingly accessible, even if it does require a sophisticated degree of interpretation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The composition of the Fairbairn Archive is rich, with a wide variety of materials\u00a0from manuscripts\u00a0to\u00a0typescripts\u00a0and\u00a0photographs to correspondence. However, amongst the most striking of all\u00a0the documents\u00a0are a collection of dream drawings, made by Ronald Fairbairn in the 1950s. Dreams have an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,9],"tags":[4,13,11,12,3,2],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/fairbairn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}