Thomas Ferguson Rodger’s Interwar ‘Dream Books’

Hannah Proctor

The history of the dream remains to be written…

—Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch’ (1925)

In April 1939, a man in Glasgow wrote down what he remembered of his dreams:

I dreamt I was married to my sister Fanny and I was filled with horror at having done such a thing. I felt overcome at the futility of such a union. In my dreams I saw my flaccid penis, limp and useless. It was like a baby’s penis, the skin being smooth and white with no hair around it… It was awful to feel thus castrated but, in such an unnatural union, perhaps it was best that I have no sexual desire. It obviated the danger of unison, but rendered it useless.

I had a huge quantity of golden razor blades in my hand, and they looked like the leaves of a beautiful book…

Archie Rutherford took me to a psychologist to get my problems solved…

I was in the kitchen and on the bed lay John Henry Lewis, the black boxer. He was drunk and roaring like a bull, and in great terror I urged my two sisters to leave for safety…

At the head of Buchanan St, I saw an erection in the street consisting of two iron poles or legs between which a vehicle was being propelled with no apparent motive power but I could detect the light glancing on an almost invisible screw thread which kept turning between the legs…1

Fears about incest and impotence, mysterious poetic images, racist sexual anxieties, geographical and historical details—I’ve never been convinced by the axiom that other people’s dreams are boring. But reading through pages and pages of hand-written dreams from the past it is hard to figure out what exactly to say about them.

Dreams are usually ephemeral. Some people don’t remember their dreams at all. These dream fragments were recorded in Glasgow in 1939 as part of a therapeutic treatment at an outpatient clinic. The man from Cambuslang who dreamt these dreams wrote them down and took them once a week to his psychiatrist, Thomas Ferguson Rodger. Rodger’s archives at the University of Glasgow hold thick reams of notes of psychotherapeutic treatments involving dream analysis with five male patients conducted in Glasgow in the interwar years.

I learnt of the existence of these documents in “A ‘commonsense’ psychoanalysis: Listening to the psychosocial dreamer in interwar Glasgow psychiatry”, a brilliant article published by History of the Human Sciences in 2020 in which Sarah Phelan discusses and contextualises these Glaswegian ‘dream books’. In Glasgow in the 1930s, Rodger (1907–78), she explains, “adopted and modified” psychoanalytic methods in the treatment of his patients, foreshadowing his post-war psychotherapeutic work in the NHS.2 Between 1948 and 1973, Rodger worked as professor of psychological medicine at the University of Glasgow. (Anti)psychiatrist R.D. Laing, also from Glasgow, was taught by Rodger and worked with him briefly at the Department of Psychological Medicine in the 1950s, before he moved to London to train as a psychoanalyst, a training he abandoned to embark on his famous experiments at Kingsley Hall and elsewhere. In the interwar years when these dreams and dream analyses were recorded, Rodger was working at Gartnavel (Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital) and in outpatient clinics in the city at the Lansdowne Clinic and the Western Infirmary.

Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Twentieth-century dream collections are not unusual. In the 1920s, British colonial officials and anthropologists gathered hundreds of dreams from South Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Charles Seligman, who initiated this project, also used a BBC broadcast to solicit dreams from members of the British public for comparative purposes.3 He wanted to ask if dream symbols were universal or culturally specific. The Mass Observation project, which launched in 1937 was also interested in dreams. It was speculated that dreams could provide insights into British people’s shared preoccupations and the “dominant images” in the culture. Slightly later, in the US in 1947, a vast “database of dreams” was collected from around the world and coded by social scientists. As Rebecca Lemov writes of that project, the goal was to gather “ordinary, everyday, unremarkable dreams from ordinary, everyday, unremarkable people”.4 Rodger’s collection of dreams is far more modest in scale and scope than any of these near contemporaneous collections. While these projects were seeking to generalise, systematise, and transform intimate and ephemeral details into data, Rodger’s dream gathering served a therapeutic function. He was trying to help these individual people, who were suffering from a range of psychological symptoms, to feel better and to understand themselves and their lives a bit more clearly. He was not using their dreams to draw grand universalizing conclusions about human nature. What’s interesting and unusual about these records is that they do not preserve dreams in isolation, nor do they only contain Rodger’s interpretations (as in the style of a typical psychoanalytic case history): they also include evidence of the dialogue and rapport between doctor and dreamer.

Rodger preserved detailed—if often illegible—notes of these five therapeutic encounters and, unlike in a conventional psychoanalytic treatment, asked his patients to write down their dreams before their sessions, which nestle in between his scribblings. As Phelan observes, the dream books document an improvised form of psychoanalytically inspired psychotherapy that took place outside official psychoanalytic institutions with non-elite patients. Theoretically as well as methodologically, Rodger’s approach was eclectic rather than adhering dogmatically to a single tradition or school. He trained partly at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore under Adolf Meyer and so his Freudian influences jostled with other ideas and traditions. Phelan situates his work in the context of a broader interest in the ‘psychosocial’ in interwar Britain, an approach which sought to understand an individual’s psychological symptoms as arising from their specific social context.

It is possible to get glimpses into social history from these case notes. One of the patients works in the office of a steel company. His main symptoms are a fear of fire and of getting fluff stuck in his throat. His cramped living situation in Burnside seems to be a source of psychological distress because he hates sleeping in the same room as a fire and hates eating in the same room in which he sleeps. Another patient plays trumpet in jazz bands in various dance halls but has had to move back in with his parents in the West End. He says he once met Louis Armstrong while he was working at the Palais in Dundee. He resents his brother who has a job working on pleasure boats around Oban. In typed up case notes about this patient from 1936, Rodger remarks:

He hates injustice of all sorts and is always annoyed by pictures of the king in a large car and the contrast of broken houses in which workmen have to live—fell out with the mother of a friend who said he was a communist when he expressed this view. [Patient] denied this, saying he only objected to the people at the top of the tree having so much and doing so little—the lady said he was impertinent as well as ‘red’—always sticks by his views and is outspoken about these which gets him enemies but is a relief to his feelings…5

The patient whose dreams I began by citing, born in 1899, describes growing up in Cambuslang with a father prone to “violent drinking bouts”.6 He studied Commercial Education at an evening class and worked as a clerk before serving in the RAF during the First World War. He ended up working in the fish trade but in 1926 the Soviet Union withdrew from the market and trade collapsed so he lost his job. He struggled to find work after this, and later due to the Great Depression. In autumn 1931, he started working at the gas department emptying slot meters and carrying coffers up and down stairs. Rodger also took notes about a man who sought out psychiatric help due to a persistent stutter who tells the psychiatrist he is the son of a blacksmith from Gartcosh and is now living in Dennistoun doing piece work. He says he spent many years working so much that he had no time to think about himself.

These are not generally the kinds of people whose dreams and fears have been recorded and preserved in detail, nor are they typical psychoanalytic analysands. Although there were psychoanalytic free clinics which treated working class patients in Vienna and Berlin in the interwar years, the cliché that Freud’s patients were mostly bourgeois is not inaccurate. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s Freud’s Patients consists of biographical sketches of Freud’s former analysands, including: a Baroness who hosted salons in the grandiose palace that she and her husband had built opposite the Vienna Opera; a bohemian baron; the richest woman in Central Europe whose husband had made his fortune as a watch seller; a conductor at the Opera of the Imperial and Royal Court; the children of horse breeders, factory owners and grain traders; and the daughter of the biggest oil importer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud famously analysed mostly his own dreams rather than those of his patients. The detailed subjective material recorded by Rodger and his patients metabolise very different kinds of social experience.

Rodger’s trumpet-playing patient dreams of a boat filled with wood on the Clyde. He dreams that he prematurely ejaculates while having sex with an older woman. He dreams of a girl in a long tiled corridor. He dreams of a tasteful shop owned by a glamorous woman. He dreams he sees Jews at a synagogue (and in another session expresses a fear of Jews and ‘Chinamen’). He dreams he’s playing with a stethoscope. He dreams of kicking a spider in a tarpaulin. Rodger describes him as getting into panics about small things (although one of the main insights of psychoanalysis is that the ‘smallest’, most insignificant seeming things can have huge psychological importance). In August 1936, Rodger asks his patient what he associates with spiders: “they are fearful, like an octopus which is another fear of his: they have such tiny bodies and long legs— never had a fright from one but just hates them—it is an effort to sit on the couch as he feels all strung up…”7

Unlike the other patients whose dreams he collected, who he saw as weekly outpatients, this man was initially an inpatient at Gartnavel psychiatric hospital. He occasionally describes walking around the grounds, receives visitors and describes interactions with staff and other patients. The notes are written by Rodger in a strange kind of stream of consciousness with dashes rather than full stops littering the text. He switches back and forth between the first and third person so the voice of the doctor smudges into the voice of his patient. The notes sometimes convey how Rodger introduced his patient to psychoanalytic concepts, describing how they discussed the treatment method:

He asked if this were a psychoanalysis he was getting: said he was getting the idea of free association. I mentioned the nature of the treatment in a general way… Thinks it strange that a doctor should take all this time with his remarks yet pleased to think these can be of interest.8

At various points he notes that the patient seems to find the method of dream analysis pointless and a bit bemusing: “dreams are generally so ridiculous”, he says. Later Rodger notes: “Often had dreams about people like this but always thought them irrelevant—always been sceptical of their interpretation.”9 At the beginning of every session after asking how the patient was doing, Rodger generally seems to have asked him about his dreams but often the entry begins with the patient saying that he didn’t remember any. Three consecutive sessions in January 1936 begin: “No dreams this week.” “No dreams doctor.” “I have no dreams.”10 Perhaps he genuinely didn’t remember or perhaps he found Rodger’s dream analysis pointless and these interactions represented small acts of resistance to the therapeutic process. The patient evidently took some interest in psychoanalysis though as one week Rodger discovered he’d been reading up on the subject between their meetings.

Somewhat confusingly Rodger sometimes writes as if he is the patient and inserts his own remarks in parentheses: “During this time I’ve had a pretty insistent picture of your face in my waking hours. I tried to visualise the details but I couldn’t… [Explain transference situation]” or “A thought has been troubling me—I see I’m making headway and I’m afraid I’ll get a certain length and stick [Explain this as resistance.]” At other points his notes take the form of a dialogue:

‘“How have you been?” “I have been fluctuating very decidedly doctor.”’

‘“How have you been?” “Everything has been fine but no dreams.”’11

When the patient said he pictured Rodger’s face, Rodger interpreted this as transference—meaning that he speculated that the patient was transferring feelings from his past relationships onto the doctor—but the form of these notes, in which the therapist seems to get constantly entangled with his patient, could be read in terms of counter-transference; that is, the notes seem to say something about the doctor’s feelings towards his patient. The way Rodger explains psychoanalytic concepts to the patient also implies a degree of reciprocity and a desire to include the patient in the process, rather than simply applying analytic insights to the patient without his knowledge, interest or understanding.

Four of the five cases include transcripts of dreams written by the patients themselves, though some are far more detailed and extensive than others. Interestingly, the dreamers’ style of recording their dreams is strikingly different. One of these men often wrote down multiple dreams a week in evocative sentences, including the fragments that I quoted above from April 1939. Another wrote in a much more abbreviated style: “Visit insurance agent’s house —Young man opens door—Agent an invalid”,12 while a third dreamer complains that he sometimes only remembers his dreams in snatches, though occasionally he records them in detail:

Have just escaped from a mob hunting me as a Communist. Walk along path lined with tall railway “sleepers” towards bridge. Another crowd is waiting for me on bridge. I know I am “done for”. I cry to two policemen “I demand police protection!” Photographer, with large press camera is standing… at end of path. As I pass him, I have to walk through zig zag passage with only room for one. Am quite calm but tense. Crowd suddenly close in on me. The photographer holds me from behind. He looks towards police—“If it’s Heffer, he won’t interfere” (To me) “We have to take you to the Sanatorium” I hope he means Gartnavel— “This will show these swine something”.13

For Freud, the precise wording used to describe a dream is of utmost importance in its interpretation:

Every analysis will demonstrate by examples how the most insignificant features of the dream are indispensable to the analysis, and how the finishing of the task is delayed by the fact that attention is not at first directed to them. In the same way we have in the interpretation of dream respected every nuance of verbal expression found in the dream; indeed, if we were confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording betraying an unsuccessful effort to translate the dream in the proper style, we have respected these defects of expression. In brief, what the authorities have considered arbitrary improvisation, concocted hastily to suit the occasion, we have treated like a sacred text.14

The dream is distorted in its conversion into speech or writing but the form those distortions take is, for Freud, always significant. Usually in psychoanalytic case histories, the patient’s spoken dream is converted into written words by the analyst after the fact, introducing a further distortion that is not the analysand’s own, whereas here the patient’s original phrasing is preserved. In his analysis of his own dreams, including the famous dream of Irma’s injection, Freud first transcribes his dream and then proceeds to break it down line by line. Under each separate sentence he writes his associations. Rodger followed the same method with his patients. The notes take each line of a dream one by one. The first line of this dream about being hunted as a Communist generated nearly a full page of notes. Sometimes a Communist is just a Communist but this dream’s manifest political content is passed over in silence and the patient’s associations instead reveal a latent sexual meaning: his fear of penetration.

There is a large body of work that criticises Freud’s case histories, accusing Freud of smothering and contorting the voices of his analysands with his own eccentric or patriarchal analyses. A whole sub-genre of feminist scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s makes the argument that in his case histories of women diagnosed with hysteria the speaking female patient is obliterated by the writing male analyst. “Freud failed Dora because he was too quick to impose his own language on her mute communications,” writes Elaine Showalter, in The Female Malady.15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus contains a comical parody of Freud’s ‘Wolfman’ case in which the Wolfman tells Freud he has had a dream about many wolves but Freud ignores this multiplicity and offers instead a reductive interpretation involving a single goat that leads him conveniently back to the Oedipus complex. Freud had, they say, “a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by.”16 Making a slightly different point that would also imply the possible limitations of Rodger’s therapeutic work with non-bourgeois patients, Ernst Bloch suggests that the psychoanalytic obsession with sex was of little help to proletarian people whose problems arose from material hardship: “the fear of losing one’s job is hardly a castration complex”.17

What is striking about Rodger’s dream books is that the patients not only wrote down their own dreams but that they seem to have participated actively and enthusiastically in the process of dream interpretation and evinced a genuine interest in psychoanalytic concepts. In the first dream I quoted above, the patient—the man from Cambuslang who had lost his job in 1926 and struggled to find work for years – dreams about incest and spontaneously brings up castration without prompting from Rodger. In February 1935 another patient sent Rodger a letter:

Dear Dr Rodger,

I feel I am being rather stupid sending you this dream instead of keeping it until Wednesday but my first thought on waking, even before I jotted it down at 3.30am, was that I must send it to you at once.

Your interpretation of my last dream must have put me in a particularly hopeful mood, and as I went to bed I had the feeling that something important would come up. I daresay, however, that to you it will be just another dream.

I have not, of course, attempted to analyse it but what struck me was the fact of my friend’s initials being the same as your own. The number 96 evident to me as oral sex persuasion.

I know you will understand why I’m sending this.18

Enclosed with the letter is a three-page-long dream about a mine in Falkirk. In this letter the patient says he won’t interpret the dream but does nonetheless offer some tentative interpretations that demonstrate a degree of familiarity with a psychoanalytic approach that would attach significance to details like initials and numbers, as well as attaching psychic significance to the relationship between doctor and patient, and inferring a sexual meaning to something that would seem, at first glance, to have little or nothing to do with sex.

Along with his dreams, the patient who later dreamt about incest and golden razors also wrote short reports on his condition for Rodger which similarly speculate about his symptoms and describe his emotional state:

Sleep very broken… Anxiety attaches itself to everything… I feel I am ambivalent towards everything. My desire to be peaceful and participate in life has never been keener. It all seems as though one “me” was looking longingly at a picture that I want to bring to life and become a part of it, and the other me sees it as symbolizing something which must be destroyed indiscriminately.19

What is interesting in these cases is not simply that Rodger treated and recorded the dreams and anxieties of people from working and lower middle class backgrounds, but that some of those people developed an interest in applying psychoanalytic insights to their own lives. Rodger did discuss material questions with these patients—work, housing, debt, broader historical forces like the Depression, the rise of fascism and the First World War—and he acknowledged the psychic impact of the external world but the men he treated also wanted to talk about sex and symbolism (and it’s not as if their sexual experiences and desires existed outside of history or had nothing to do with their class positions, as their discussions of contraception, marriage, repressed homosexuality and the romantic challenges associated with overcrowded, insecure and overpriced housing make very clear). Of course, losing your job is not a castration complex, and individual therapy cannot solve the suffering caused or exacerbated by structural and economic issues. B ut psychoanalytic ideas and treatments should not be the preserve of the bourgeoisie. People who have lost their jobs also dream and have strange and sometimes debilitating fears and anxieties that empathetic and regular psychotherapy of the kind Rodger was practising in interwar Glasgow could help to unravel.

It is probably not particularly surprising that a man living in Glasgow in the mid-1930s had a dream about being hunted down as a suspected Communist (incidentally, this was not the same man who was accused of being a ‘red’). The manifest content of the dream, of course, says something about the historical moment in which it was dreamt. What is more striking is that the man interpreted his own dream about Communism as having a (homo)sexual meaning. The fact another man sent a dream to Rodger by post with an accompanying letter between sessions similarly suggests that he was enthusiastic about the therapeutic approach and found it illuminating. Just as Freud did in his discussions of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, this patient was not just passively awaiting Rodger’s pronouncements but tentatively performing a kind of lay auto-analysis. The dream he sent ended with the following lines:

I am filled with a feeling of great terror… At the same time the number 96 flashes in my mind. Trying to think out a way of getting past the unknown.20

Notes

  1. Thomas Ferguson Rodger Papers, 1907–78, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/4. These references are all to the relevant set of case notes, each of which refers to a different patient, but they do not have page numbers and the entries are not all dated. Thanks to the archivists at the University of Glasgow for their help. ↩
  2. Sarah Phelan, ‘A ‘commonsense’ psychoanalysis: Listening to the psychosocial dreamer in interwar Glasgow psychiatry,’ History of the Human Sciences, 34, 3-4 (2020), 142-168. ↩
  3. Erik Linstrum, ‘The Empire Dreamt Back’, Aeon, December 4 2017. https://aeon.co/essays/britains-imperial-dream-catchers-and-the-truths-of-empire. Accessed September 8 2026. ↩
  4. Rebecca Lemov, The Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 7. ↩
  5. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 081/7/3/4/2. ↩
  6. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/4. ↩
  7. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  8. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  9. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  10. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  11. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  12. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/5. ↩
  13. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/6. ↩

  14. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 407. ↩
  15. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 160. ↩
  16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 26. ↩
  17. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), p. 66. ↩
  18. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/5. ↩
  19. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/2. ↩
  20. Thomas Ferguson Rodger papers, GB 248 DC 81/7/3/4/5. ↩