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I should like to lay it down that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. In fact, the ego in the present dream does not stand only for my friend but for myself as well. I was identifying myself with him, because the fate of his discovery seemed to foreshadow the reception of my own findings. If I were to bring forward my theory emphasizing the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of psychoneurotic disorders (cf. the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient’s cry of ‘Nature! Nature!’), I should come across the same criticisms; and I was already preparing to meet them with the same derision.

If we pursue the dream-thoughts further, we shall keep on finding ridicule and derision as correlates of the absurdities of the manifest dream. It is well known that it was the discovery of the split skull of a sheep on the Lido of Venice that gave Goethe the idea of the so-called ‘vertebral’ theory of the skull. My friend boasts that, when he was a student, he released a storm which led to the resignation of an old Professor who, though he had once been distinguished (among other things in connection precisely with the same branch of comparative anatomy), had become incapable of teaching owing to senile dementia. Thus the agitation which my friend promoted served to combat the mischievous system according to which there is no age limit for academic workers in German universities - for age is proverbially no defence against folly. - In the hospital here I had the honour of serving for years under a chief who had long been a fossil and had for decades been notoriously feeble minded, but who was allowed to continue carrying on his responsible duties. At this point I thought of a descriptive term based upon the discovery on the Lido.¹ Some of my young contemporaries at the hospital concocted, in connection with this man, a version of what was then a popular song: ‘Das hat kein Goethe g’schrieben, das hat kein Schiller g’dicht . . .’ ²

¹ [‘Schafkopf’, literally ‘sheep’s head’, = ‘silly ass.’]

² [‘This was written by no Goethe, this was composed by no Schiller.’]