You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dreams, Freud was fond of repeating, provide a royal road to the unconscious activities of the mind. In his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud makes consistent use of the metaphor of a journey. The discoverer himself guides the reader along the road he has made through terra incognita. Freud describes his journey specifically enough so that a “map” can be drawn. I want to examine his journey, in particular to concentrate on a point of transition, the place where Freud turns from the study of the dream (based largely on verifiable clinical observation) to the hypotheses (called “paths that will end in darkness”) that are meant to account for all psychic structure and psychic functioning: the three pages of introduction to Section A of the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams.
“At this point,” Freud says, there is a dream “which has special claims upon our attention.” Its source, he says, is not known to him, but was told him by a woman patient who had heard it in a lecture on dreams, and who proceeded to “re-dream it, thereby making it her own.” We can assume that, whatever its source, Freud makes the dream his own: he interpolates it at the crucial turning point of his journey.
A father, whose sick child had just died, left an old man to watch over the boy's body, leaving the door open to go to sleep in the next room. He had a dream: his child was standing beside his bed, and caught him by the arm, whispering reproachfully, ‘Father, don't you see I'm burning?’ The father awoke to find that the old man had fallen asleep, a candle had overturned and one of the child's arms was burning. Freud says that the words spoken by the child must have been made