Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Interpretation and recognition

Revisiting his dream of the botanical monograph in chapter 6, Freud reveals that behind his jocular association to his favorite flower, the artichoke, lies a further association, to Italy. It isn't hard to guess the link; fried artichokes were no doubt a specialty of Roman restaurants already in Freud's day. The pertinence of Italy to the dream's underlying wish isn't hard to guess, either, given all that Freud has said in relation to other dreams about Hannibal and Rome. Oddly, though, Freud doesn't seem aware that he hasn't yet demonstrated Italy's pertinence to this particular dream. As the fastidious and tactful translator, James Strachey, observes in a footnote, the mention of Italy "seems to be a reference to an element in the dream-thoughts not previously mentioned." Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his friend Fliess was visiting Italy without him, as he reveals in his analysis of another dream of his? What if Fliess gets to Rome first? Generals have to worry about that sort of thing. In any case the lapse suggests that Italy was so fixed in Freud's mind that it was hard for him to keep track of whether he'd already mentioned it.

Meanwhile, there's an almost self-punitive tone to Freud's continuing revelations about his feelings for Fliess. He reports that after Fliess, "a man of importance," was attacked "by an unknown young writer" in print, Freud dreamed about the great German author Goethe attacking a young man, "Herr M." In Freud's dream, he misremembered the year of Goethe's death, substituting instead the year that one of his patients had been born, and he explains that dreams sometimes include such a deliberate reversal of facts in order to signal that the dream itself is to be reversed during interpretation—that the state of affairs in the dream is to be understood under the rubric "just the reverse." Fliess/Goethe didn't deserve to be attacked; the young critic should have been. The interpretation is plausible but not convincing, and at the conclusion of his example, Freud added in 1911 this comment: "It is remarkable to observe . . . how frequently reversal is employed precisely in dreams arising from repressed homosexual impulses." Suddenly Freud's interpretation seems even less convincing. A little later, he reports a dream whose chief characteristic was the sense Freud had at the time of its startling clarity: the dream was about presenting Fliess with "a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality"—a theory not itself included in Freud's dream, to his sorrow. Many, no doubt, are the men who have wished for a brilliant theory of bisexuality to explain troubling feelings to themselves. That Freud eventually came up with such a theory doesn't make this dream any less telling.

One doubts, too, Freud's interpretation of his dream of seeing a placard with the sentence "You are requested to close the eyes" or "You are requested to close an eye." Freud says that he dreamt it the night before his father's funeral, that the closing of two eyes referred to the funeral, and that the closing of one expressed his wish that his relatives would "wink" at the modesty of the service that Freud had organized, in accordance with what he felt were his father's wishes. But Strachey, ever the detective, notes that Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess at the time that he dreamt this dream the night after his father's funeral. A historian is obliged to prefer the contemporaneous testimony. Instead of looking ahead to the funeral with anxiety, the dream must have looked back to his father's death with remorse, and in that case, the one eye may have been the one that his father submitted to Freud's colleague for glaucoma surgery, and the two may have belonged to Oedipus—the psychological significance of whose story Freud had just set forth, for the first time in history, in chapter 5.

Of course I can't prove that the interpretations I'm sketching here are any more valid than those given by Freud himself. Decisive proof is hard to come by, in dreamland. If dreams may mean the reverse of what they seem to represent, if affectionate feelings in dreams may disguise hostile wishes, if logical and causal relationships are dissolved in dreams, and if a word in a dream may mean either itself or its opposite or simply refer to a context in which the dreamer recently heard it's used, then it's hard to see how one could decide between interpretations impartially. There are too many variables in the equation; there's freedom along too many axes. In practice, though, the freedom proves not to be too great, or at least one doesn't feel that it is, because one experiences an almost physical relief upon solving a dream. One recognizes the answer. All the pieces of the puzzle click into place.

I had a dream last night, for example, to some extent inspired by our Freud reading group, in which a young man with a cat-like moustache said, "It's sexy," and in the dream I said to myself, Oh, he meant to say 'sexual.' The reference might have been to the erotic frisson incidental to discussing psychology with friends—to the slippage between sexual and sexy. This morning's meeting, for instance, featured a digression about male versus female wet dreams. But Freud says unequivocally that spoken words in a dream always derive from spoken words in waking life, and I couldn't at first recall hearing anything like the words "It's sexy" in our reading group or anywhere else. The notion of a cat-like moustache seemed strange, because I didn't exactly know what it meant. Cats made me think of dogs, though, and suddenly I remembered.

A few days ago, walking our dog, I crossed paths with a young man with a pit bull. The young man was taciturn; the pit bull was straining at the end of his leash ambiguously. I asked, of the pit bull, "Is he friendly?"

"It's sexy," the man answered.

I was baffled. "It's what?" I asked.

"Her name is Sexy," he said. He had misheard my question. Sexy was friendly, as it turned out, and the two dogs played nicely together—which must have been my wish for the reading group, too.

The feeling of recognition seems superior to everything Freud offers by way of method. But his theory of recognition, like that of bisexuality, seems to have been left out.

Ambition and ambivalence

Further contributing to Freud's charm is his candor about his ambition, which is associated in his mind—or perhaps one should say, in his case—with bedwetting, a confession that can't help but win him powerful allies, since all the most interesting people wet their beds until an advanced age. Freud reports that when reproached for the offense at age two, "I consoled my father by promising to buy him a nice new red bed in N., the nearest town of any size." At age seven or eight, upon urinating in his parents' bedroom, Freud was dismayed to hear his father say, "The boy will come to nothing." The verdict was to haunt Freud's dreams into adulthood, when his dreams would still be endeavoring to disprove it.

In the promise to buy his father a bed, Freud sees "all the megalomania of childhood," and his manner of confession lets the reader know that he is alert to the humor of the megalomania. He recounts that at his birth, an "old peasant-woman" prophesied to his mother that "she had brought a great man into the world"—a prophesy he deprecates by noting that the world is full of "mothers filled with happy expectations" and of old peasant-women eager for a chance to please someone. In boyhood, he confesses, he dreamed of visiting Rome in emulation of no less than Hannibal, "the favorite hero of my later school days." Freud saw Hannibal as a fellow outsider. "To my youthful mind, Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church." Hannibal, moreover, took arms against his sea of troubles, whereas, in the Moravian town where Freud was born, Freud's father had had his cap knocked off by a Christian who shouted, "Jew! get off the pavement!" and had done no more than pick up his cap and walk on. "Hannibal's father," Freud recollected, pointing the contrast, "made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans." The child Freud aspired, in other words, to vanquish Christendom and rule the world. Indeed, when pealing bells nearly awoke the adult Freud, one morning during a vacation in the Tyrol, he revenged himself on the Tyroleans' piety by rolling over and dreaming that "the Pope was dead." In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud was to famously describe the mind as resembling Rome in its juxtaposition of ancient and modern structures, but even in the Interpretation there are already hints that Freud sees psychoanalysis as his Roman campaign. In my favorite passage, Freud adds a footnoted postscript to his regret that scheduling conflicts kept him from visiting Rome before 1899: "I discovered long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfil wishes which till then have been regarded as unattainable; and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome."

Ambition isn't all that unflattering a thing to confess. But as he did in the dream of Irma's injection, Freud continues in the middle chapters of the Interpretation to make somewhat more imprudent confessions as well, whose effect on readers he seems less aware of or in control of. He repeatedly announces that he's not revealing everything:

For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any further.

I can assure my readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood scene.

I must desist at this point because the personal sacrifice demanded would be too great.

Nonetheless he repeatedly reveals far more than is necessary to demonstrate his ostensible point. Of his dream about a botanical monograph, for example, Freud writes that "my only purpose in reporting it was to illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it." But it sheds light on a great deal more. It links Freud's pride in having aided in the discovery of cocaine as an anaesthetic to his chronic self-indulgence as a bookworm and to the triumph he felt when his father—the one who didn't think Freud would ever amount to anything—was given cocaine anaesthesia by one of Freud's friends while another of Freud's friends operated on his glaucoma. Freud's feeling of triumph or perhaps defiance returns in a long dream of his with a "Revolutionary year 1848" coloring, which ends with Freud presenting a "male glass urinal" to a one-eyed man—again a reference to Freud's ambition and to his father's glaucoma, which blinded his father in one eye. "What [the dream of the botanical monograph] meant was: 'After all, I'm the man who wrote the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)' . . . [and] 'I may allow myself to do this.'" The feelings of pride and entitlement are understandable, maybe even excusable, but the triumph over his father raises questions. Was it to vindicate the father whose hat was knocked off that Freud vowed to conquer Rome? Or was it to replace him? Rome, after all, is a type of power and authority. If the discoverer of the Oedipal complex did set out to seize the paternal authority, didn't he feel a little, well, guilty about it?

In the preface to the second edition of the Interpretation, Freud writes that he came to understand later that the book constituted "a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death." I wondered in my earlier post if Freud's revelations in the book could be read as an invitation, but I began to wonder, while considering the middle chapters, whether this invitation might not have been an altogether conscious one—whether in communicating more than he needed to about his dreams Freud might have been acting on a wish of which he was not fully aware. In that light, consider the most disquieting revelation in Freud's account of the dream of the botanical monograph, a daydream that he had the morning after:

If ever I got glaucoma, I . . . thought, I should travel to Berlin and get myself operated on, incognito, in my friend's [Fliess's] house, by a surgeon recommended by him. The operating surgeon, who would have no idea of my identity, would boast once again of how easily such operations could be performed since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not give the slightest hint that I myself had had a share in the discovery.

Like a hysteric, Freud is imagining a connection through a bodily ailment. In the dream of Irma's injection, he had imagined a link (pain in the left shoulder) between himself and a young female patient whom he had turned over to Fliess for an operation. Now he is imagining a link (glaucoma) between himself and his father, and wishing that he could turn himself over to Fliess for an operation. The operation is to be in a strangely impersonal way a triumph for Freud, as a co-discoverer of cocaine anaesthesia, but it is impossible to keep from noticing that it would also put Freud in the position of the triumphed-upon—of the father whom he has shown up. The most disturbing element of the fantasy is the role assigned to Fliess: the man with the knife. Like the real-life Emma Eckstein who lay behind Irma, Freud is not suffering from an illness that justifies a wish to have Fliess cut him open. Perhaps he wishes to submit to punishment by Fliess as a compensation for what he feels that by writing the Interpretation he is doing to his father. Fliess, however, is proving unsatisfactory as a father substitute, because the confidence he offers—the confidence that shores up Freud's—has little to do with evidence. Just a few pages prior, in fact, Freud in a very lengthy and rather boring footnote, added in 1911, shows that he can't find any grounds for agreeing with Fliess that men's dreams follow a 23-day cycle or women's a 28-day one. It is dawning on Freud that Fliess's confidence may be arbitrary and that he may therefore be dangerous. If, because you feel guilty about your own assault on authority, you go searching for it in others, you may make yourself vulnerable to punishments you don't in fact deserve.

Perhaps Freud's oversharing could be thought of as his search, after the loss of his father, for someone to submit to who isn't Fliess. Perhaps he was redirecting his wish for submission toward an ideal. As an intentional act, The Interpretation of Dreams represents an enormous assumption of authority—the establishment of no less than a new understanding of the human mind. To compensate for the authority that he was establishing over his reader, perhaps Freud felt compelled to submit himself for analysis to that same reader—to the reader whom the book itself was calling into existence.

Naive and sentimental dreaming

I'm re-reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams with some friends. Since I'm at a loss as to what to blog about any more, or why blogging should occur at all, perhaps I'll blog about it. No promises.

Two forces meet the reader of the Interpretation: Freud's authority and his charm. Are they monsters? Seducers? Has-beens? The authority interferes before the book is even picked up. One reads Freud because one has heard of him; at last one has decided to make up one's own mind. One has heard that he's been discredited, but one has also heard that the discreditors may be motivated by obscure grudges. There's always someone around who knows a little about Freud's biography or about the later development of his ideas, a person who can't help but blurt out these revelations, which are in their way further obstacles to reading the book itself.

The authority is also manifest in Freud's style—in his judiciously structured sentences and his broad range of cultural and scientific references. The first chapter contains a lengthy survey of everything that myth and science have had to say about dreams, each datum carefully described and ticketed and slipped into what one imagines to be a row of numbered cubby holes in Freud's rolltop desk.

Except he didn't have a rolltop desk, and one knows because one has seen it, in Vienna or London. And this is because of the second force, his charisma, whose pull one feels even before reaching the first chapter, in the very first of the eight prefaces, when he says, as ingenuously as Montaigne or Thoreau, that science has obliged him to describe his own dreams, and therefore "it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or than is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet." Even without having read the book that follows—even without its instruction—the reader hears the secret message: I am more poet than scientist. Freud then asks the reader "to grant me the right of freedom of thought—in my dream-life, if nowhere else." He's a hero, but a hero who's a little ironical about himself. How can such a man be resisted?

The charm, after this early twinkle, is more or less submerged for the next hundred pages, which are so methodical as to cause even a patient reader to wonder whether it's really necessary to read this book—whether hearing about it might suffice. The uncanny thing about this literature survey—inextricable from its boringness—is that the commonsensical ideas described are more or less eternal. They still surface in newspapers and conversation all the time. One has heard them over and over without ever having felt that it was worth the trouble to challenge them. One will certainly hear them again, even after reading this book, and still let them pass. One will probably even recite a few of them oneself. Few are out-and-out wrong. It's the notion that they are sufficient that Freud intends to puncture—the notion that there's nothing else to dreams, nothing with a coherent meaning or of nontrivial importance.

Through this obscurity—Freud later described it as "the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees)"—the charm occasionally gleams, as in the intermperate moment when Freud rolls his eyes at medicine's fondness for the Ebenezer Scroogian conception of dreams as mental nonsense generated by somatic disturbances, such as an indigestible dinner: "Anything that might indicate that mental life is in any way independent of demonstrable organic changes . . . alarms the modern psychiatrist. . . . But if at the moment we cannot see beyond the mental, that is no reason for denying its existence." Unhand me, materialists! By the time we reach Freud's description of a treatise by a mystic named Scherner, said to be "written in a turgid and high-flown style and . . . inspired by an almost intoxicated enthusiasm for his subject which is bound to repel anyone who cannot share in his fervous," we feel that we know Freud well enough to say to ourselves that it's just like thim to decide that the best book on dreams, other than his own, is an unreadable one.

In chapter two, Freud at last begins to set forth his own ideas, in the form of a method for understanding dreams: First, record everything in the dream, no matter how trivial, absurd, or embarrassing. Then, record every association that each fragment of the dream calls up in your mind, again refusing to judge the value or pertinence of the association. Adopt here, if possible, the grandeur of Schiller's rebuke to all critics:

You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds. . . . You reject too soon and discriminate too severely.

Be silly like us.

Of course it isn't safe to be silly in public—not on the internet, not even in the pages of a psychoanalytic treatise. It's only safe in a setting designed to make it safe, where confidentiality is guaranteed, and one's interlocutor has credibly promised neither to retaliate against any hostility that one may inadvertently express nor to take advantage of any desire. Yet Freud imprudently reveals his dream to us and its meanings: he admits that he wished for the persistent illness of a patient he calls Irma to be someone else's fault—hers, perhaps, for remaining attached to her symptoms despite his unraveling for her of their meaning, or another doctor's, for injecting her with a dirty syringe, or still another's, for being ludicrously inobservant. Freud admits to being troubled by memories of patients who died while under treatment by him. He is remarkably candid but by his own admission not completely so: "If anyone should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of my reticence, I would advise him to make the experiment of being franker than I am."

He shows that his dream revenges himself on colleagues whom he suspected of disapproving of his treatment of Irma, and his revelations are sufficient to demonstrate his hypothesis that "A dream is the fulfilment of a wish." The particular wish, however, lay only in his dream's upper strata, beneath which he declined to dig, observing in a footnote that although he knew there was more "there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown." Trust me on this, says the veteran explorer. But didn't he just tell us to look where the critical faculties would dissuade us from looking? Haven't we been told that the message Looking here is more trouble than it's worth is a sign of buried treasure? A navel was once a point of contact with the mother. It is a place where contact with the mother was cut off. To whom else might Freud have been led if he had continued to follow the association that he interrupted by invoking the metaphor of the navel—an association that had so far brought him from Irma to a friend of Irma's to Freud's own wife—a series he characterized as women "who would also have been recalcitrant to treatment"?

More than a century after the publication of Freud's dreambook, it is notorious that Freud left out of his account of the dream of Irma's injection a traumatic incident that must have contributed to it. Freud's friend and ally as he was constructing the discipline of psychoanalysis was an ear, nose, and throat specialist named Wilhelm Fliess, who developed peculiar ideas about the nose as a locus for sexual dysfunction. Freud let Fliess operate on his nose, and on the nose of at least one of his patients, a young widow who resembles the Irma of his dream. This patient, named Emma Eckstein, failed to improve after Fliess's surgery. Like Irma, she was suspected by Freud of remaining too fond of her symptoms. But during a physical examination of her in Freud's presence, another ear, nose, and throat specialist made a startling discovery: Fliess had left behind in Eckstein's nasal cavities half a meter of gauze, which was rotting. As it was removed, Eckstein bled and briefly lost any pulse; Freud nearly fainted. "So this is the strong sex," Eckstein teased Freud once he had recovered. (The details may be found on pp. 80-87 of Peter Gay's biography, in a 2003 article by Madelon Sprengnether in American Imago, and in many other places.)

Freud's omission could be read as a deception. In Freud's telling, Fliess appears only as an association to the chemical trimethylamin, which appears in the dream as part of the injection given to Irma, which may have left her infected. "Trimethylamin," Freud writes, "was an allusion not only to the immensely powerful factor of sexuality, but also to a person whose agreement I recalled with satisfaction whenever I felt isolated in my opinions." But the partiality of Freud's account might also be read as an invitation. Even a reader ignorant of Emma Eckstein's story will sense the further sexual possibilities, unexplored by Freud, in such lines as Freud's disavowal of any wish to know more about the reference in his dream to Irma's clothedness: "Further than this I could not see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point." Freud shares with the dream-Irma a pain in the left shoulder. Perhaps he also shares with her a fear of being contaminated by Fliess's sexual injection or of being harmed by Fliess's surgery. Or a wish for that contamination or that harm. Such possibilities hardly impair Freud's charm or even his authority. Shouldn't a doctor be troubled nights by the question of whether he's really helping his patients? Freud's methods merely turn out to be more revealing than he knew; he is more the ironic hero than ever.

Ugly duckling

I have a blog post about Splice, the new science fiction movie about baby-sitting, over at The Paris Review.