Interpreting Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1950-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. [Freud’s ‘Verdichtung’ is usually rendered as ‘condensation’ in English; I have chosen ‘compression’ because, although the process clearly includes condensation (the reduction of a single element), it also embraces the bringing together, in abbreviated form, of a multiplicity of elements (something that ‘condensation’ cannot properly imply). Really, Freud’s ‘Verdichtung’ is a process of ‘making denser’, of ‘concentration’.]

2. References to compression in dream may be found in the works of many writers. Du Prel says at one point (p. 85) that it is absolutely certain that a process of compression of the ideational sequence has taken place.

3. [Goethe, Faust, Pt 1, scene 4.]

4. [Überdeterminiert; not ‘over-determined’ but ‘springing from a number of factors’.]

5. In tribute to the writer’s account, the reader is referred to the meaning of climbing dreams given in the section on symbolism. [Chapter 6, section E, especially sub-section 7. The novel Sapho (the French spelling of ‘Sappho’) by Alphonse Daudet was published in Paris in 1884. It concerns a young man from the provinces who comes to the capital and there forms a liaison with a model, to whom he becomes completely subjected.]

6. [Abgestiegen; literally, ‘stepped down’.]

7. [Einkehrwirtshaus (incidentally, the word in the first sentence of the dream that I translate as ‘inn’ suggests a place where one ‘calls in’ (Einkehren) for refreshment during a country walk rather than an establishment where one would seek accommodation. Hence, no doubt, the coachman’s evident disparagement.]

8. [My ‘conversely’, ‘the other way around’ and ‘reversed’ are all, in German, umgekehrt.]

9. The fantastical nature of the situation in relation to the dreamer’s wet-nurse is proven by the fact, objectively ascertained, that in this instance the wet-nurse was his mother. Incidentally, may I remind the reader of the regret mentioned on p. 220 as having been experienced by the young man of the anecdote at not having taken better advantage of the situation with his own wet-nurse, a regret which is no doubt the source of this dream.

10. This was the actual dream-trigger.

11. Let me add that, in her view, such reading was poison for a young girl. She herself, she told me, had in her youth garnered much from banned books.

12. [Le Nabab is another novel by Alphonse Daudet, published in 1877.]

13. A further train of thought leads to the same author’s Penthesilea: cruelty towards one’s beloved. [The author of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn and Penthesilea, two blank-verse plays, is the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), as Freud was evidently confident all his readers would know. One thing that English readers might need to know is that Käfer (‘beetle’) is also used in much the same sense as our ‘bird’ or ‘chick’ as a somewhat lightweight term for a young woman.]

14. [Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), explorer and anthropologist, made pioneering studies of eugenics using superimposed photographs.]

15. [Examples of these monumental gateways of Greek architecture are the Athens Propylaea (built on the Acropolis in the fifth century BCE) and the Munich Propyläen (built 1862).]

16. [Much closer in German, of course: Propylen-Propyläen.]

17.

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