“I May Allow Myself to do This”: Conflict in Freud’s Writing of The Interpretation of Dreams

Freud’s Context of Writing

As Freud was writing the dream book, he was well aware of his ambition that it rattle our understanding of human consciousness. At the same time, he was mourning the death of his father. He was also under pressure to support his growing family, as his wife was pregnant with their sixth child. Chapter 5 will show how Freud was working through conflicts over ambition and its inhibition, all wrapped up in feelings about asserting himself as better than his father, an actualization of the oedipal themes he was working to identify even as they inhibited him. While the entire book is replete with Freud’s dreams, deepening and adding complexity to what I will say, I will limit my discussion to the central dreams of chapter 5 that lead to his articulation of the oedipus complex.

As Freud crafted the book, he was in the grip of a great ambition that had its roots in his childhood. In a letter to Fliess, Freud had written, “As a young man I knew no longing other than that for philosophical insight, and I am now in the act of achieving this by steering from medicine to psychology” (Masson 1985, p. 180; Schur 1972, pp. 96–97). In 1896 he wrote to Fliess: “I see that via the detour of being a physician, you have attained your first ideal—the understanding of man through physiology; while I secretly nurse the hope of reaching by the same path my original goal of philosophy. For that is what I wanted originally, when I did not yet know the purpose of my being in this world” (Masson 1985, p. 159; Schur 1972, p. 93). As he was writing this book, Freud felt he was pursuing his life’s dream, aspiring to leave a mark on the world through the knowledge he was revealing in this text. Something like solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Freud was making a universal claim about the riddle of human consciousness.

Shortly after completing The Interpretations of Dreams, Freud wrote to Fliess, asking

Do you suppose . . . that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?—

In This House, on July 24^th, 1895

the Secret of Dreams was Revealed

to Dr. Sigm. Freud.

Freud felt compelled to add, “At the moment there seems little prospect of it” (Masson 1985, p. 417; Freud 1900a, p. 121).

While writing, Freud knew that this was to be his life’s work, and in his 1931 preface to the third edition he admits as much: “Insight such as this,” he writes, “falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime” (1900a, p. xxxii). He was possessed by ambition, but also beset by doubt. His ideas had recently been called a “scientific fairy tale” and he was not generally being received well by the Viennese medical community (Masson 1985, p. 184). Further, he was terrified that he might die before completing the book. These doubts and apprehensions had to be worked through if Freud was to produce this ambitious text. Because of the work with his own dreams that Freud makes available, we are able as readers to watch this process unfold.

The Professor Extraordinarius Dream

First I will turn to Freud’s professor extraordinarius dream, first discussed at the end of chapter 4, which centers on themes of ambition and its disavowal. It is stimulated by the news that two professors have recommended Freud’s appointment as professor extraordinarius, the equivalent of assistant professor. The news comes as a surprise to Freud, and he is especially pleased by it in that he knows that these recommendations were not based on a personal relationship with him. However, he immediately tries to temper his enthusiasm with the awareness that anti-Semitism will likely prevent his actual promotion. Two Jewish colleagues had been kept waiting, seemingly in vain, for this promotion. Freud’s response to the news clearly manifests both ambition and a wish to distance himself from that ambition. He realizes that his dream conveys his wish to be appointed to the professorship, yet he needs to disavow this wish: “I am not, as far as I know, ambitious; I pursue my medical practice with gratifying success, even without the recommendation of a title. Besides, it was not a question of my calling the grapes sweet or sour, for undoubtedly they hung too high for me” (Freud 1900b, p. 108). ²

Freud’s paper on negation (1925) teaches us to distrust a claim like “I am not, as far as I know, ambitious.” Freud’s correspondence with Fliess shows that ambition was a very current issue for Freud at this stage of his career. As readers, we can hear more than Freud means to tell us—his conflict with ambition is something he would wish to brush aside, but that we, as readers, cannot miss.

In the dream, Freud writes these themes large, so that the emotional context is more palpable. He sees that he has represented his two colleagues whose appointments have not come through as a simpleton and a criminal. In so doing, he protects his hope that his own promotion will go through—that his Jewish identity will not hold him back. “If I can ascribe their rejection to other grounds which do not apply to me, my hopes will remain undisturbed” (Freud 1900b, p. 110).

In analyzing the dream, Freud goes on to address the ambition that came through in it, which he could not accept. The wish to receive this appointment didn’t feel strong enough to him to justify the intensity of the ambition in the dream.

If my need to be addressed by a different title was so strong, it pointed to a pathological ambition which I do not recognize in myself and which I believe is quite foreign to me. I do not know how others who think they know me would judge me in this matter; perhaps I really have been ambitious; but if so, my ambition has long since been aimed at other goals than the rank and title of a professor extraordinarius.

So where did the ambition that inspired my dream come from? [Freud 1900b, p. 147].

In reflecting on the source of this heightened sense of ambition, Freud is brought back to a story he was often told as a boy. It seems Freud’s mother, then pregnant with him, had encountered an old peasant woman who prophesied that the baby was to be a great man. Freud wonders if this story could have engendered his ambitiousness, but this memory sparks a thought of another, later childhood experience, which better accounts for his ambition. When he was eleven or twelve, Freud’s parents frequently took him to dinner in the town square. One evening, Freud’s father sends him to fetch a tableside poet. Before beginning his recitation, the poet rewards Freud with a verse, proclaiming the boy would grow up to be a cabinet minister. Freud is enthralled by this prediction, as this was a time when boys were very excited by the “Bürger Ministry,” the middle-class liberal government then in power in Austria, which even included some Jews. Freud’s father had brought home portraits of the ministers, which they had hung around their home. He recalls that this was probably the inspiration for his intention to study law, which he gave up only shortly before entering university. As Freud returns to his dream, he can now see what it has achieved:

In treating my two learned and worthy colleagues so badly because they are Jews—one as if he were a numbskull, the other as if he were a criminal—in acting in this way, I am behaving as though I were the minister, I am putting myself in the minister’s place. What a thorough revenge on His Excellency! He declines to appoint me professor extraordinarius, and in return, in my dream I put myself in his place [Freud 1900b, p. 148].

This dream, which Freud intends to illustrate that childhood wishes live on in our dreams, also presents a first take on oedipal themes, as Freud is playing them out unconsciously through his dreamwork. He invites his readers to view the presence of his ambition, alongside his need to deny or disavow it. He shows how ambition brings him into competition with older men, father figures, and that in order to pursue this ambition there is a need to denigrate them. Freud expresses his wish to step into his father’s shoes, to identify with father figures. By placing himself in the role of cabinet minister, Freud is asserting his right to make his own ethical laws, to govern himself. As readers, we cannot but notice that all of these themes are being played out at large in the very writing of this book, Freud’s grand oedipal gesture of bettering his father. Blos (1987) captures Freud’s situation:

We know that Freud’s father expected great things from his son; these expectations had settled like fateful obligations within Freud’s moral conscience. This mandate aggravated his psychic task to loosen and transcend the father attachment, rooted in a never sufficiently abandoned dyadic father idealization. The attempted resolution of the father fixation seemed to have been channeled into the son’s passionate and single-minded striving to reveal the mysterious origins and workings of psychic illness. His work reveals in historical perspective the personal conflicts which played a significant role in determining his professional life. We are well acquainted with the creative coupling of several tasks and their mastery; such joined strivings are summarized under the concept of motivation; one striving is objective and goal-directed and the other is personal and emotionally biased. The life histories of creative thinkers and inventors have granted us glimpses here and there into these arcane and overdetermined workings of the mind [p. 436].

The Botanical Monograph Dream

In the dream of the botanical monograph, a new riff on these themes emerges. In this dream, Freud is looking at a monograph he had written on a certain plant, and is turning over a colored plate in the book. “The book is lying in front of me, I am just turning to a coloured plate inserted into it” (Freud 1900b, p. 129). The dream reminds him that on the previous morning he had been thinking about how he had written a monograph on a plant, in which he revealed the anesthetic properties of cocaine. “I had referred to this use of the alkaloid myself in my publication, but was not thorough enough to take the matter further” (p. 129). His ambitions even back then had been thwarted by ambivalence. Perhaps, even then, Freud, anticipating his paper on those “wrecked by success” (1916), feared pressing his claim of professional celebrity. These thoughts lead to a daydream in which he imagines the following: if he were to develop glaucoma, he would travel to his friend Fliess’s house in Berlin and have surgery done without identifying himself to his surgeon. When the surgeon spoke of the instrumentality of cocaine for the procedure, he would never reveal that he was involved in that discovery. In thinking through this daydream, Freud recognizes that a specific memory inspired it. Freud’s father had had glaucoma, and the surgery had brought him together with the two other men who were essential to this scientific triumph.

This daydream leads Freud back to a childhood memory:

On top of that, I do not know why, a memory comes to me from my very early years. My father once amused himself by handing over a book with coloured plates . . . to me and my eldest sister for us to destroy. Hardly justifiable as a way of educating the young. I was then five years old, and my sister not yet three, and the picture of us children blissfully pulling this book to pieces . . . is almost the only clear memory of this period of my life I still retain. Then, when I became a student I developed a decided preference for collecting and owning books (analogous to my inclination to study from monographs . . .). I became a bookworm. . . . Ever since I began to reflect on myself, I have always traced this first passion of my life back to this childhood impression, or rather, I recognised that this childhood scene was a ‘screen memory’ for my later bibliophilia [Freud 1900b, p. 131].

This recollection conveys Freud’s sense of his father’s encouragement of him, and the way in which this encouragement shapes a central aspect of Freud’s identity. Freud takes his father’s gift of a book as an inspiration for becoming a bookworm, a creature that destroys its beloved object with its desire. This brings to mind a recent letter from his friend Fliess, to whom he had been sending parts of the dream book as he was writing it. “I am very much engaged with your dream-book,” Fliess had written. “I can see it lying finished before me and I am leafing through the pages” (Freud 1900b, p. 131). Freud’s father substitute was endorsing the book even as Freud was writing it.

But Freud’s thoughts about his father’s support yield to contrary ideas:

Naturally I learned very early that passions today can mean sorrow tomorrow. When I was seventeen I had a considerable account with a bookseller and no means of meeting it, and my father was unwilling to accept it as an excuse that my inclinations had not been for anything worse [Freud 1900b, pp. 131‍‍–132].

Freud’s enthusiastic pursuit of book-collecting, nurtured by his father’s support, leads him into conflict with his father, who sees him as a spendthrift. In his interpretation of this dream, Freud concludes that

the dream again acquires the character of a justification, a plea on my own behalf. . . . Now the implication is: “But I am the man who wrote the valuable and successful treatise [on cocaine].” . . . In both cases, then: “I am justified in claiming this” [Freud 1900b, p. 132]. ³

The dream represents a self-justification, but as readers we might ask, Who is the audience for this defense? Freud is identifying with his father in imagining having glaucoma that takes him to surgery, but he is also bettering his father, by placing himself as the man who contributed to the use of cocaine for that surgery. He is speaking to the father who gave him the book, inspiring his bibliophilia, but also to the father who shamed him for overspending on books. Within his passion for books are destructive themes, like pulling a book to pieces or acquiring a debt, ⁴ but he is also writing a book that will be his life’s work. Freud is asserting his right to claim his successes (“I may allow myself to do this”) to a father whose pride in him felt uncertain. He is leaning on Fliess’s encouragement of his project, while mourning the death of his father.

As dream interpreters, we might pause before Freud’s account of his father’s early invitation for him to symbolically destroy him by tearing apart his book. Freud is beginning to grasp a potential for patricidal feelings alongside his reverence for his father and for Fliess. Further, he is conveying a way in which his father may have encouraged these feelings in him, attuned to their necessity in the process of individuation.

Freud’s intention is for this dream to illustrate that indifferent events from the previous day stimulate dreams, but as readers/interpreters, we see that oedipal themes have advanced through this dream. Along with recognizing his ambition and his wish to prove himself to his father, Freud is expressing emerging wishes to better his father. Palombo (1988) observes “Freud’s oedipal wish to thrust aside the intellectual legacy of paternal authorities in order to make way for his own achievements.” But, he adds, “At the same time he wished to retain the approval of his father surrogates and win their admiration for this competitive victory” (p. 894).

The Rome Dreams

In turning to the Rome dreams, Freud begins to add feelings of shame about his father, further complicating this picture. Freud describes a series of dreams about his longing to visit Rome at a time when he was experiencing an inhibition in allowing himself to do so. The associations to these dreams idealize the forbidden destination, while also conveying confusion and paralysis. “Thus, the wish to go to Rome became for my dream-life a cloak and symbol for several other fervent wishes” (Freud 1900b, p. 151).

One association to these dreams is to a Jewish joke of sorts. A Jew had tried to stow away on a train to Karlsbad but had been found. Each time that tickets were inspected, this man was taken off the train and beaten. When the man ran into an acquaintance on the train who asked him his destination, he replied: “Karlsbad . . . if my constitution can stand it” (1900a, p. 195). ⁵ This joke captures Freud’s sense of guilt, a feeling that he would have to suffer for his successes. Again, perhaps the suffering is necessitated by the hateful or destructive feelings erupting in relation to his father.

Freud goes on to discuss a recent journey to Italy in which he turned back when he was fifty miles from Rome, which led him to a realization:

And there I was, following in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him, I had not been granted a sight of Rome. . . . But Hannibal, whom I had managed to resemble so much, had been my favourite hero when I was at the Gymnasium. . . . In the upper school, when I first became aware of the consequences of being descended from an alien race, and the stirrings of anti-Semitism among my schoolfellows urged me to take up a position, the figure of the Semitic general rose even higher in my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolized to me the opposition between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church [Freud 1900b, pp. 150–151].

These recollections of his childhood reverence for Hannibal bring to mind a highly significant memory:

And this is the moment when I hit on the experience from my youth which is still exerting its power in all these dreams and feelings even today. I must have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks and in conversation tell me his views on the things of this world. In this vein, to show me how I had been born into better times than he had, he once told me: ‘when I was a young man I went for a walk on a Saturday in the town you were born in, wearing my best clothes and with a new fur cap on my head. Then a Christian comes along, knocks my cap in the road with a single blow, and shouts: “Jew, get off the pavement”’—‘And what did you do?‘—‘I stepped into the road and picked up my cap,’ came the impassive reply. That did not seem to me very heroic of the big, strong man who was leading me by the hand. I compared this situation, which I was not happy about, with another more suited to my feelings: the scene where Hannibal’s father, Hasdrubal, makes his son swear before the domestic altar to take revenge on the Romans. From that time on, Hannibal had a place in my fantasies [Freud 1900b, p. 151].

Freud recognizes transference in this story: he has come to replace his father with the image of Hannibal as a role model and a hero he wishes to emulate. Hannibal’s father made him promise to take revenge on the Romans, which is precisely what Hannibal did. Freud might have wished for a father who, similarly, would expect and encourage his son to charge forward into success, rather than pick up his cap and go home. As Anzieu (1986) states, “Freud’s increasingly overt disrespect for his father was accompanied by increasingly fierce ambition, whose existence, to his great surprise, had already been revealed by earlier dreams” (p. 329).

Freud is blocked from Rome by a sense of being a tragic hero, “sacrificed upon the altar of the ambition of a father or a father figure” (Grinstein 1968, p. 89). He wants to be aggressive and powerful, like Hannibal, but “because these feelings [are] dangerous . . . he identifie[s] with his father in the very aspect of passivity that he found so disappointing, and which in and of itself implie[s] personal disaster” (p. 89). This relates to other inhibitions Freud has referenced, notably his failure to take credit for his discovery of cocaine’s anesthetic properties.

This dream is included as evidence that present-day wishes are reinforced by childhood wishes in dreams, and yet readers can see how these dreams build on specific associations and meanings that Freud’s previous dreams have elucidated. Freud isn’t inhibited only by the grandeur of his aspirations. He is also held back by his sense of his father as an unheroic man. Freud’s identification with his father keeps him from allowing himself to go to Rome and generates a feeling that he should be beaten if he boards a train bound for the Italian city. But if we agree that Rome stands in for “other passionate wishes,” we might also agree that Freud is inhibited about writing this book about wishes. Rome—the notion of traveling to new lands, “the eternal city” (1900a, p. 196)—might be equated with other desires, such as possessing the mother(land) or conquering new understandings of human nature. Guilt would be a natural outgrowth of these ambitions, in that they amount to a desire to overtake or even destroy his father. As Blum (1981) notes,

The conquistador had to deal with his guilt for penetrating the secrets of nature.

. . . The successful outcome of this conflict was not to close the eyes in identification with the deceased father, but to be able to remain comprehending and curious and to transform the prohibition into an inner ideal of total inquiry without any censorship. The opposite command was invoked—to know thyself, to face the truth, even bitter truth, without compromise, to see in others what they fail to recognize in themselves [p. 546].

Freud, then, calls up an alternate ego ideal, in the form of Hannibal, to counter inhibitions coming from his identification with his father. He needs to identify with a powerful hero in order to claim the new territory his book is gaining access to. However, we are in a position to reflect on Freud’s father’s story, and its meaning. To Freud, his father’s passivity in response to the challenge of the Christian reads as castration or weakness. Yet it can also be viewed as autonomy, a refusal to play at the identity games his challenger was invoking. Freud might have found a model in his father, with whom he unconsciously identified. ⁶

Anzieu (1986) complicates the nature of Freud’s identification with Hannibal. He points out that

it was Hannibal, who wanted to destroy Rome, [who] in fact brought down destruction on himself and his people. . . . Thus, we can begin to glimpse the significance of Freud’s heroic identifications: they were also masochistic identifications. But he did not himself become aware of them until a few months later, when he found their prototype in another tragic destiny taken not from history but from legend—that of a Greek tragic hero. And much later Freud wrote an essay entitled, significantly, “Those Wrecked by Success” (1916) [p. 201].

In Freud’s effort to break out of his masochistic identification with his father, he falls into another masochistic identification. Here is a first viewing of Freud’s repetition compulsion in action. Again and again, we see Freud tiptoe up to the edge of discovery and pull back. As Ellenberger (1970) states, “He felt on the verge of discovering great secrets . . . but soon fell back, the prey of doubts” (p. 446). Freud keeps returning to his work on cocaine, wanting to claim that he drove home a discovery he in fact undermined. He has held back from going to Rome and hurt himself by acquiring debt at a bookstore. This is all a preamble to the difficulty he is now encountering in trying to present his revolutionary discoveries to the general public, trying to step into a far loftier role than professor extraordinarius.

The Count Thun Dream

The long and complex Count Thun dream revisits themes of ambition and competition. It is inspired when Freud, catching a train for his summer vacation, encounters a count who is traveling to see the emperor. As Freud recounts the story, he describes being “in an exuberant, aggressive mood the whole evening”; he “had needled waiters and cab-drivers—without offending them, I hope; now all kinds of impudent and revolutionary thoughts are going through my mind” (Freud 1900b, p. 161).

In his discussion of the dream, Freud makes note of

impertinent boastings, the issue of a ludicrous megalomania long since suppressed in my waking life, which even ventures at particular points into the manifest dream-content . . . and in any event offers an excellent explanation of my exuberant mood on the evening before the dream [1900b, p. 166].

These feelings take him back to a childhood scene:

The following scene from my childhood was told me, and my memory of it has been replaced by the recollection of that account. Before the age of two I am supposed to have occasionally still wet the bed, and when I was rebuked for this, so I am told, I consoled my father with the promise that . . . I would buy him a lovely new, red bed. . . . The child’s entire megalomania is contained in this promise [1900b, p. 166].

Strachey’s translation completes this paragraph with greater force: “We have also learned from the psycho-analysis of neurotic subjects the intimate connection between bed-wetting and the character trait of ambition” (1900a, p. 216).

It is notable that Freud is now able to acknowledge his ambition, in the context of childhood wishes. It seems that the working through of other dreams has enabled Freud to accept the feelings of ambition and megalomania that earlier he disavowed. He goes on to another memory:

Then there was another domestic incident when I was seven or eight which I remember very well. One evening before going to bed I broke the rule that one must not relieve oneself in one’s parents’ bedroom in their presence, and in the course of rebuking me for this, my father let fall the remark: “Nothing will come of the boy.” ⁷ It must have been a terrible blow to my ambition, for allusions to this scene recur in my dreams again and again and are invariably connected with enumerations of my successes and achievements, as though I wanted to say: “You see, something did come of me.” ⁸ This childhood scene also provided the material for the last image in the dream, in which, of course, the roles were reversed in revenge. The older man, plainly my father, since the blindness in one eye signifies the glaucoma he suffered in one eye, is now urinating in front of me as I once did in front of him. With the glaucoma I am reminding him of the cocaine which had been of help to him during his operation, as if thereby I had fulfilled my promise. Besides this, I am making fun of him: because he is blind, I have to hold the bottle out to him, and I am reveling in allusions to my knowledge of the theory of hysteria, which I am proud of [Freud 1900b, pp. 166–167].

Freud has returned to the conflict over whether he could dare to better his father, by buying him a new, red bed, or whether his father was right that he would come to nothing. Now Freud places his father in the weaker position, as the old man with glaucoma who is peeing in front of him, while he is feeling superior, again resting on the laurels of his success with the discovery of the anesthetic properties of cocaine. What is left unspoken in this context, yet immediately available for readers to glean, is that the book that we are reading is a far greater leap than the cocaine discovery. It ups the ante on Freud’s wish to prove himself a great man. Writing this book has incited the “impudent and revolutionary ideas” that Freud was experiencing the night before he dreamt of Count Thun. He has stepped into Hannibal’s shoes, and we have watched this happen through the unfolding of his dreams. Quietly, as we have watched this happen, we have stepped into Freud’s shoes as analyst and dream interpreter.

Elaboration of the Oedipus Complex

With these dreams in the background, we are now better positioned for Freud’s revelation of his theory of the oedipus complex. After all, we have seen oedipal themes played out, interpreted, and worked through in following Freud’s elaboration of his successive dreams. We have even been brought into the role of dream interpreter, by reading these dreams and seeing the latent messages they convey in dialogue with each other. Through these dreams, Freud masters the inhibitions that are blocking him from Rome, or from acknowledging his ambition, or from writing this book. He can now assert his great discovery with the following claim:

It was perhaps ordained that we should all of us turn our first sexual impulses towards our mother, our first hatred and violent wishes against our father. Our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, is only the fulfilment of our childhood wish. But, more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, at least insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. . . . Like Oedipus we live in ignorance of those wishes, offensive to morality and forced upon us by Nature, and once they have been revealed, there is little doubt we would all rather turn our gaze away from the scenes of childhood [Freud 1900b, p. 203].

Freud goes on:

The dream of having sexual intercourse with the mother is dreamed by many today as it was then, and they recount it with indignation and amazement. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the father’s death. The Oedipus story is the imagination’s reaction to these two typical dreams, and just as the dreams of the adult are filled with feelings of revulsion, the legend too is bound to include the horror and self-punishment in its content [Freud 1900b, p. 203].

Freud’s dreams are no exception to these rules. We see multiple, overlapping dreams of rivalry and competition with men who can be seen to stand in for Freud’s father. The ambition to make great discoveries, to amount to something, and to see forbidden lands is analogous to a desire to possess one’s mother. And certainly Freud exposes us to his own feelings of repulsion, horror, and self-punishment in the context of these dreams. Notable, however, is Freud’s presentation of his own oedipal themes. Certainly the complex, contradictory, and highly ambivalent dynamics in Freud’s relationship with his father are brought closely into view. We see the hateful side of Freud’s feelings for his father, but also the loving, admiring, and desirous feelings, the negative oedipus complex. We may feel we know Freud’s father through the various depictions of him that Freud has rendered. The aspect of this complex that is driven by a possessive desire for the mother, however, is left mostly in the shadows. Freud’s mother is symbolized by his desire to possess volumes of books or to solve existential riddles or to visit Rome. We are kept at some distance from his more visceral maternal longings. Others have speculated about the meaning of Freud’s less articulated relationship with his mother (Sprengnether 1990; Whitebook 2017), but there are undoubtedly many threads in this dynamic. Freud’s mother, much younger than her husband, was still alive and very present in his life as he was writing this book. Further, his associations to his mother in the text point toward death, loss, and unknowable navels (Freud 1900a, pp. 111 n. 1, 525). I suspect that Freud’s feelings about his mother were more complex and harder to reach than his feelings about his father. This is relevant when we consider that all of the insights Freud achieved were won without the assistance of an interlocutor in the form of an analyst.

Freud becomes aware in working through these dreams that he is not just a rival to his father in relation to his mother’s love. He is fighting for a higher position of power and authority than his father was able to achieve, and he is doing this through writing this book. “In a way, his mourning not only held his dead father’s absence in its startled hands, but also the discovery of the Oedipus complex as well” (Mahon 2013, p. 880). Freud’s book is his grand oedipal gesture.

Anzieu (1986) captures the process we have just seen up close:

Never before, no doubt, had a reader or even a confidant been able to monitor so closely the inhibition of a creator toiling over the gestation of his work and battling against resistance to discovery. At first Freud did not feel himself up to his task or his ambitions. Like Joseph and the ancient interpreters of dreams, it was in his own dreams that he derived confidence in himself, his work, and his ideas. That confidence welled up from his very first years: the memory of the book he pulled to pieces symbolized the happy period of his childhood, just as his father later made the Philippson Bible a symbol of his thirst for knowledge. . . . It was no coincidence that Freud concluded The Interpretation of Dreams with a kind of apologia of the unconscious. Dreams, he said, pursue and complete the work of our waking lives. There is nothing surprising in that, because they are driven by the same psychical forces that enable the waking intellect to work. But, as Freud went on to assert clearly, dreams can do more than that. Drawing strength from deep-lying impulses, dreams are capable of fashioning future actions. . . . The confidence required to write [this book] was thus put within his grasp [p. 289].

As Freud would later theorize, the way out of the oedipal complex is through identification. In identifying with his father, Freud could retain a sense of connection to his father’s successes, and also feel entitled to thrive independently. As the book progresses, we see Freud allowing himself to take on the challenges he has set up for himself, in the model of his father’s ambition, integrity, and independence, While writing this paper, I have grown aware of a similar conflict for me, as the author. I, too, have needed to allow myself to do this as I have endeavored to reveal something in Freud that Freud himself was unaware of having expressed. In that way, I am trying to better Freud, and yet my resolution of this conflict is also through identification. After all, I am using the best of what I have learned from Freud to understand Freud.

Conclusion

We have now seen in greater depth Freud’s ambition, his disavowal of his ambition, his competition with his father, his disappointment with his father, his wish to prove himself to his father and earn his father’s love, his sense of being a source of both pride and disapproval for his father, and ultimately, his avowal—in the theorization of the oedipus complex—of his hatred of his father. In this way, Freud’s unconscious was working through the blocks to writing The Interpretation of Dreams while he was actually writing it, a text that presents an introduction to a foundational concept in psychoanalysis, the oedipus complex.

I would add that every analyst can relate to the resistance that Freud works through throughout the text, since it is emblematic of the work of pushing into unconscious themes that spring up in every analysis. Mahon (2013) writes that “Freud was as unflinching as Sophocles, . . . in the sense that he insisted on eyes being open, even as he closed the eyes of the dead father—an act of courageous, visionary, oedipal hubris that does not need to blind itself, even as it re-presents its guilt to itself, in the fierce tenderness of human insight” (p. 894).

Each analyst must also push through the resistance to seeing her own inner conflicts about naming what has been unnameable, and repressed. As Freud (1910) wrote, “no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit; and we consequently require that he should begin his activity with a self-analysis and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients. Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis” (p. 145).

Freud (1937) later recommended that every five years analysts should re-submit themselves to analysis. As Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) put it, “to practice analysis successfully, one must be armed with a knowledge of one’s own unconscious” (p. 454). This is directly analogous to the work we have witnessed Freud doing in writing The Interpretation of Dreams. Reading this text assists the reader in liberating new thoughts. It invites the creativity that becomes unbridled in Freud as we make our way through the text, interpreting Freud as we integrate his ideas. Just as we watch Freud grow into a capacity to step into the shoes of a cabinet minister, or of Hannibal, we are tacitly invited to step into Freud’s shoes, as analyst. In so doing, we approach a recognition of the universal power of the unconscious.

This method of reading The Interpretation of Dreams allows us to see the way in which this book presents a multiplicity of meanings, and layers of meaning. By interweaving personal asides and self-references into its intellectual focus, Freud generates a surplus of associations, where there is always more to interpret. Interpretations build on each other and speak to each other. In this way, the book shows what it is designed to articulate. Readers are themselves drawn into the act of interpretation, such that we come to understand firsthand the infinite nature of interpretation. Freud might better have titled the book Interpretations of Dreams.

I do realize that there is something subversive in suggesting this title. After all, it is clear that Freud was making the case for an interpretation, a bottom line. Yet we now know that every interpretation is only as total as the moment in which it is conceived. Every time we return to a dream, or an interpretation of a dream, there is more to interpret. Nachträglich, as Freud construed it. Meanings accrue, inviting interpretation. It was only in the preface to the book’s second edition that Freud came to recognize its part in his mourning process. Similarly, my oedipal reading of the book is possible only in hindsight, since the book was written long before Freud had conceptualized an oedipal complex, or come to see that as a defining aspect of being human. His book is a testament to the infinite nature of interpretation, even if this aspect of the book escaped Freud’s awareness.