Re-Writing Freud

the long version

Poetry. In this new work, RE-WRITING FREUD the artist Simon Morris has re-written Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. A computer program randomly selects words, one at a time from Freud's 223,704 word text and begins to reconstruct the entire book, word by word, making a new book with the same words. A virus or process of contagion has been at work, intervening in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, rupturing it and returning it to us in a new order. By subjecting Freud's words to a random re-distribution, meaning is turned into non-meaning and the spectator is put to work to make sense of the new poetic juxtapositions. With a scrupulous formalism, Morris' version of Freud's text follows the conventions of typographic layout found in the 1976 Penguin edition of Freud's work. The publication is edited by Craig Dworkin, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah.