1078

The material of the dream was derived from three sources:

(1) Herr M., whom I had got to know among some company at table, asked me one day to examine his elder brother, who was showing signs of general paralysis. In the course of my conversation with the patient an awkward episode occurred for he gave his brother away for no accountable reason by talking of his youthful follies. I had asked the patient the year of his birth (cf. the year of Goethe’s death in the dream) and had made him carry out a number of calculations in order to test the weakness of his memory.

(2) A medical journal, which bore my name among others on its title-page, had published a positively ‘crushing’ criticism by a youthful reviewer of a book by my friend F. in Berlin. I took the editor to task over this; but, though he expressed his regret, he would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that our personal relations would not be affected by the event. This was the true source of the dream. The unfavourable reception of my friend’s work had made a profound impression on me. It contained, in my opinion, a fundamental biological discovery, which is only now - many years later beginning to find favour with the experts.

(3) A woman patient of mine had given me an account a short time before of her brother’s illness, and how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of ‘Nature! Nature!’ The doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his studies. I had remarked that it seemed to me more plausible that his exclamation of the word ‘Nature’ should be taken in the sexual sense in which it is used by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own genitals. He was eighteen at the time of his outbreak.

Behind my own ego in the dream-content there lay concealed, in the first instance, my friend who had been so badly treated by the critic. ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data.’ My friend’s book dealt with the chronological data of life and among other things showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of a number of days that has a significance in biology. But this ego was compared with a paralytic: ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in.’ Thus the dream made out that my friend was behaving like a paralytic, and in this respect it was a mass of absurdities. The dream-thoughts, however, were saying ironically: ‘Naturally, it’s he who is the crazy fool and it’s you who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it couldn’t be the reverse?’ There were plenty of examples of this reversal in the dream. For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack the great Goethe.