If I add further that the book of my friend so severely criticised (“It
is a question whether the author is crazy or we are” had been the
opinion of another critic) treats of the _temporal relations of life_
and refers the duration of Goethe’s life to the multiple of a number
significant from the point of view of biology, it will readily be
admitted that I am putting myself in the place of my friend in the
dream. (_I try to find some explanation of the chronological
relations._) But I behave like a paralytic, and the dream revels in
absurdity. This means, then, as the dream thoughts say ironically. “Of
course he is the fool, the lunatic, and you are the man of genius who
knows better. Perhaps, however, it is the other way around?” Now, this
other way around is explicitly represented in the dream, in that Goethe
has attacked the young man, which is absurd, while it is perfectly
possible even to-day for a young fellow to attack the immortal Goethe,
and in that I figure from the year of Goethe’s death, while I caused the
paralytic to calculate from the year of his birth.
But I have already promised to show that every dream is the result of
egotistical motives. Accordingly, I must account for the fact that in
this dream I make my friend’s cause my own and put myself in his place.
My rational conviction in waking thought is not adequate to do this.
Now, the story of the eighteen-year-old patient and of the various
interpretations of his cry, “Nature,” alludes to my having brought
myself into opposition to most physicians by claiming sexual etiology
for the psychoneuroses. I may say to myself: “The same kind of criticism
your friend met with you will meet with too, and have already met with
to some extent,” and now I may replace the “he” in the dream thoughts by
“we.” “Yes, you are right; we two are the fools.” That _mea res agitur_,
is clearly shown by the mention of the short, incomparably beautiful
essay of Goethe, for it was a public reading of this essay which induced
me to study the natural science while I was still undecided in the
graduating class of the Gymnasium.
VI. I am also bound to show of another dream in which my ego does not
occur that it is egotistic. On page 228 I mentioned a short dream in
which Professor M. says: “My son, the myopic ...”; and I stated that
this was only a preliminary dream to another one, in which I play a
part. Here is the main dream, omitted above, which challenges us to
explain its absurd and unintelligible word-formation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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