Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61

Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century moderns turned their efforts to the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as manifested or materialized in psychological test results, life histories, and records of jokes, invective, and strong sentiments. Techniques proliferated, from the Thematic Apperception Test to the Rorschach to the Draw-A-Person. Taken around the world to provide ‘X-ray pictures’ of the inner life, such tests were said to render subjective materials in usable form. Collectors gathered the resulting sets of ‘human data’ on a scale and scope never before encountered. Among various efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to collect, catalogue and store – in short, to file – these new masses of data on the most human parts of being human, none was more ambitious than the ‘Database of Dreams’ assembled in 1956. Funded by the National Research Council, run by a cadre of psychologists and anthropologists and accessing decades of ethnographic and documentary research, ‘Primary Records in Culture and Personality’ attempted to map the scope of all such collections and to write a strategy for preserving and circulating them. This pre-digital, Microform-based encyclopaedic device – a database of databases – played a part in the movement to found a post-war. American science of subjectivity, pursued through objectivist methods. The aim of this paper is to reassess the early Cold War targeting of ‘innerness’ within a larger quest to assemble the complete range of possible knowledge.