outside influence, and this is perhaps the further recollection of the
bunch of flowers missed by Mrs. L. I do not believe that these
underlying thoughts would have been sufficient to call forth a dream.
“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To tell us this,”
as we read in _Hamlet_. But behold! I am reminded in the analysis that
the name of the man who interrupted our conversation was Gärtner
(Gardener), and that I found his wife in blooming health;[AS] I even
remember now that one of my female patients, who bears the pretty name
of Flora, was for a time the main subject of our conversation. It must
have happened that I completed the connection between the two events of
the day, the indifferent and the exciting one, by means of these links
from the series of associations belonging to the idea of botany. Other
relations are then established, that of cocaine, which can with perfect
correctness form a go-between connecting the person of Dr. Koenigstein
with the botanical monograph which I have written, and strengthen the
fusion of the two series of associations into one, so that now a portion
of the first experience may be used as an allusion to the second.
I am prepared to find this explanation attacked as arbitrary or
artificial. What would have happened if Professor Gärtner and his
blooming wife had not come up, and if the patient who was talked about
had been called, not Flora, but Anna? The answer is easy, however. If
these thought-relations had not been present, others would probably have
been selected. It is so easy to establish relations of this sort, as the
joking questions and conundrums with which we amuse ourselves daily
suffice to show. The range of wit is unlimited. To go a step further: if
it had been impossible to establish interrelations of sufficient
abundance between the two impressions of the day, the dream would simply
have resulted differently; another of the indifferent impressions of the
day, such as come to us in multitudes and are forgotten, would have
taken the place of the monograph in the dream, would have secured a
connection with the content of the talk, and would have represented it
in the dream. Since it was the impression of the monograph and no other
that had this fate, this impression was probably the most suitable for
the establishment of the connection. One need not be astonished, like
Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau, because “it is the rich people of the world
who possess the most money.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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