Dream Psychology

young man. It seems to me plausible that he was eighteen. I am not
certain, however, what year we are actually in, and the whole
calculation falls into obscurity. The attack was, moreover, contained
in Goethe's well-known essay on 'Nature.'"_

The absurdity of the dream becomes the more glaring when I state that
Mr. M---- is a young business man without any poetical or literary
interests. My analysis of the dream will show what method there is in
this madness. The dream has derived its material from three sources:

1. Mr. M----, to whom I was introduced at a dinner-party, begged me one
day to examine his elder brother, who showed signs of mental trouble. In
conversation with the patient, an unpleasant episode occurred. Without
the slightest occasion he disclosed one of his brother's _youthful
escapades_. I had asked the patient the _year of his birth_ (_year of
death_ in dream), and led him to various calculations which might show
up his want of memory.

2. A medical journal which displayed my name among others on the cover
had published a _ruinous_ review of a book by my friend F---- of Berlin,
from the pen of a very _juvenile_ reviewer. I communicated with the
editor, who, indeed, expressed his regret, but would not promise any
redress. Thereupon I broke off my connection with the paper; in my
letter of resignation I expressed the hope that our _personal relations
would not suffer from this_. Here is the real source of the dream. The
derogatory reception of my friend's work had made a deep impression upon
me. In my judgment, it contained a fundamental biological discovery
which only now, several years later, commences to find favor among the
professors.

3. A little while before, a patient gave me the medical history of her
brother, who, exclaiming "_Nature, Nature!_" had gone out of his mind.
The doctors considered that the exclamation arose from a study of
_Goethe's_ beautiful essay, and indicated that the patient had been
overworking. I expressed the opinion that it seemed more _plausible_ to
me that the exclamation "Nature!" was to be taken in that sexual meaning
known also to the less educated in our country. It seemed to me that
this view had something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards
mutilated his genital organs. The patient was eighteen years old when
the attack occurred.

The first person in the dream-thoughts behind the ego was my friend who
had been so scandalously treated. _"I now attempted to clear up the
chronological relation."_ My friend's book deals with the chronological
relations of life, and, amongst other things, correlates _Goethe's_
duration of life with a number of days in many ways important to
biology. The ego is, however, represented as a general paralytic (_"I
am not certain what year we are actually in"_). The dream exhibits my
friend as behaving like a general paralytic, and thus riots in
absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically. "Of course he is a
madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands all about it. But
shouldn't it be the _other way round_?" This inversion obviously took
place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd,
whilst any one, however young, can to-day easily attack the great
Goethe.

I am prepared to maintain that no dream is inspired by other than
egoistic emotions. The ego in the dream does not, indeed, represent only
my friend, but stands for myself also. I identify myself with him
because the fate of his discovery appears to me typical of the
acceptance of _my own_. If I were to publish my own theory, which gives
sexuality predominance in the aetiology of psychoneurotic disorders (see
the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient--_"Nature, Nature!"_), the
same criticism would be leveled at me, and it would even now meet with
the same contempt.

When I follow out the dream thoughts closely, I ever find only _scorn_
and _contempt_ as _correlated with the dream's absurdity_. It is well
known that the discovery of a cracked sheep's skull on the Lido in
Venice gave Goethe the hint for the so-called vertebral theory of the
skull. My friend plumes himself on having as a student raised a hubbub
for the resignation of an aged professor who had done good work
(including some in this very subject of comparative anatomy), but who,
on account of _decrepitude_, had become quite incapable of teaching. The
agitation my friend inspired was so successful because in the German
Universities an _age limit_ is not demanded for academic work. _Age is
no protection against folly._ In the hospital here I had for years the
honor to serve under a chief who, long fossilized, was for decades
notoriously _feebleminded_, and was yet permitted to continue in his
responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido,
forces itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful
colleagues in the hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day:
"No Goethe has written that," "No Schiller composed that," etc.

We have not exhausted our valuation of the dream work. In addition to
condensation, displacement, and definite arrangement of the psychical
matter, we must ascribe to it yet another activity--one which is,
indeed, not shared by every dream. I shall not treat this position of
the dream work exhaustively; I will only point out that the readiest
way to arrive at a conception of it is to take for granted, probably
unfairly, that it _only subsequently influences the dream content which
has already been built up_. Its mode of action thus consists in so
cooerdinating the parts of the dream that these coalesce to a coherent
whole, to a dream composition. The dream gets a kind of facade which, it
is true, does not conceal the whole of its content. There is a sort of
preliminary explanation to be strengthened by interpolations and slight
alterations. Such elaboration of the dream content must not be too
pronounced; the misconception of the dream thoughts to which it gives
rise is merely superficial, and our first piece of work in analyzing a
dream is to get rid of these early attempts at interpretation.