Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/364

346 upon I broke off relations with the journal, and in my letter of resignation expressed the hope that our personal relations would not suffer from the incident. The third source of this dream is an account given by a female patient—it was fresh in my memory at the time—of the mental disease of her brother who had fallen into a frenzy, crying "Nature, Nature." The physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from a reading of Goethe's beautiful essay, and that it pointed to overwork in the patient in the study of natural philosophy. I thought rather of the sexual sense in which even less cultured people with us use the word "Nature," and the fact that the unfortunate man later mutilated his genitals seemed to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the age of this patient at the time when the attack of frenzy occurred.

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