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Freud's Wishful Dream Book Freud’s Wishful Dream Book A L E X A N D E R W E L S H Freud’s Wishful Dream Book princeton university press, princeton, n. j. Copyright 1994 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Welsh, Alexander. Freud’s wishful dream book / Alexander Welsh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03718-3 (cloth) 1. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. Traumdeutung. 2.Dream interpretation. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Title. BF175.5.D74W45 1994 154.6′34—dc20 94-10758 This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 13579108642 The whole thing is planned on the model of an imagi- nary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees), hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader—my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes—and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you wish to go now? Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 6 August 1899 C O N T E N T S preface ix chapter one “A Dream Is the Fulfilment of a Wish” 3 chapter two “Dreams Really Have a Secret Meaning” 29 chapter three “So Far as I Knew, I Was Not an Ambitious Man” 51 chapter four “It Had Been Possible to Hoodwink the Censorship” 79 chapter five “The Only Villain among the Crowd of Noble Characters” 109 index of works cited 139 P R E F A C E This short book consists of a commentary in five parts on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, as published in the last months of 1899 and revised over the years until the author’s death in 1939. It would be rash of me to claim that no commen- tary already exists, since the dream book has many times been combed for its autobiographical insights, for its story of the dis- covery of psychoanalysis, for its introduction to the methods and theory of analysis, and for its dreams—most of which have been subjected to enthusiastic reinterpretations by other persons. Yet I know of no concerted attempt to examine the book critically so as to take into account both the construction of the argument and Freud’s marvelous self-presentation. Briefly stated, here is what I argue: that as its title suggests, Freud’s book is about interpretation, but that it never would have been as persuasive without its pretension to science; that the procedures of the book are inductive up to a point, but the arbitrary turnings that Freud takes can best be explained as wish- ful, pleasing not only to the writer but to his readers; that his interest and that of his readers in secrets and detection has a history (which cannot be traced here but has been touched upon in my other work); that Freud’s analysis of his dreams of ambi- tion always falls within polite bounds and steadily redounds to his credit; that his modest ambition is also a product of its time and may usefully be seen as inspiring the Oedipus complex rather than the other way around; that the institution of the censorship, very much a feature of the dream book, is also and necessarily socially grounded; that the genre of the book, consid- ered as a frame story embracing many dreams and anecdotes, is a romance or serial comedy; that Freud occasionally employs make-believe—that is, invents evidence, if one insists on think- ix Preface ing of the book as science—but generally within the parameters of a conventional homiletics; and that the finale of the dream book, and much of the humor throughout, can be understood only as a particular kind of fine performance. The Interpretation of Dreams is in some respects an interpretation of ambition; it turns ambition, understood as a set of motives to be acted upon, into wishfulness, a varied and nearly boundless set of aggressive fantasies more suited to storytelling. One reason for such a commentary is simply practical. Freud’s influence on the intellectual life of the second half of the twenti- eth century in the West is perhaps greater than that of any other writer of his time, so it becomes impossible, short of taking a lifetime or forming a committee, to examine very seriously more than one text at a time. Sebastiano Timpanaro’s commentary on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life may be thought of as a model for the present one on the dream book. Unfortunately, more expert attention has been directed to the outline of Freud’s thinking in his private correspondence and papers than to the manner in which it became fixed by public presentation in The Interpretation of Dreams. Like Timpanaro and others, I have be- come very concerned with the arguments to which the writer thus committed himself, the more so because he typically reveals that he was aware of their shortcomings. Even if one discounts the relation of psychoanalysis to science, these arguments need to be examined much more closely if we expect to gain any just understanding of Freud’s influence on modes of interpretation in literary, historical, and social studies today—to say nothing of popular psychology. The present commentary frankly empha- sizes the pleasures of the dream book, its accommodations and appeal, in an attempt to account for its undoubted success. I also stress the dependence of its arguments on historical conditions and therefore call for more study of those conditions. At the close of the commentary, I try to indicate where I stand with respect to the current criticism of psychoanalysis. “The Interpretation of Dreams was a revolutionary work,” Frank Kermode has recently remarked; “it did not aVect general x Preface ideas about interpretation at once, but over the century its influ- ence has been decisive.” To a certain extent, while not forgetting the book’s place in the development of Freud’s thought and its wide dissemination, I have tried to re-create the experience of reading it for the first time. This initial eVort to detach the argu- ment from received ideas about it was made possible by the par- ticipation of very bright students, all of whom knew something about Freud but none of whom had ever read the dream book, in seminars over the past few years. The rule followed in those seminars was the same as that of the commentary: never to dis- miss any turn in the argument as unwarranted or the inclusion of any illustration as irrelevant without trying to define what new ground the unexpected turn achieved or what purpose the illustration finally served. Besides other writings by and about Freud, the seminarians pored over his favorite Dickens novel, David Copperfield, as a control exercise in the study of fiction and wish fulfillment—an exercise that may explain the mysteri- ous surfacings of that novel in the pages that follow. My greatest debt is to the UCLA and Yale students who faith- fully read the dream book, page by page, and made plain their reactions to it. I could scarcely have found a more diverse group of students, in terms of ethnic background, economic well- being, or academic field, if I had hired an opinion pollster to select them: not only their shared intelligence but their varied perspectives benefited us all. Meanwhile a number of people, in- cluding J. William Schopf, Helene Moglen, and Nina Auerbach, prompted some friendly occasions for trying out my own con- clusions about Freud’s censorship. Two colleagues professionally committed to psychoanalysis, Herbert Morris and Peter Gay, generously encouraged me in this eVort to breach disciplines, regardless of their partial or total disagreement with what I was saying. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, the best reader one could dream of, was immensely helpful with my second draft, as always. So did the readers for Princeton University Press, and the diplo- matic Robert Brown, help substantially, after the final draft was expertly retyped by Diane Repak. To all such readers and listen- xi Preface ers, my repeated thanks; and of course I accept responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment that remain. Virtually all studies of Freud in English are profoundly in- debted to the Standard Edition, the labor of James Strachey and his colleagues, published in London by Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis and at present distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton. I think it foolish to carp—as some do—about the translation of this edition, which is a won- der of completeness, cross referencing, and bibliographical exact- itude. When quoting from it, I have regularly consulted the Ge- sammelte Werke; and where translation has seemed to close down some alternative meaning, or I think my readers might wish it, I have supplied the original German in parentheses. At many points I am indebted to various authorities on Freud and have indicated so by naming them and citing the reference. Perhaps footnotes could have expressed my agreement or diVerences more exactly, but for a commentary on a book that—starting with Freud himself—has been more often footnoted than care- fully reconsidered, I decided to rule out discursive notes and write of the dream book as simply as possible.
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