2. Biographical Roots*

The specimen of dream analysis Freud presented to the world at the end of 1899 was simply to demonstrate that every dream's “content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish.” A few lines later, Freud defined the purpose of the dream as a “plea—for the dream was nothing else,” reminding him of funny folk devices of soul “defense” against accusations of crime or sin.1 The basic motive of dreaming, in short, is self-justification. Freud could not bring himself to see it as the fundamental wish-fulfilment of all fantasy, because of his desire to exalt pleasure and libido as the prime movers of human nature. When he finally came round to the recognition that fear, which he preferred to call anxiety, was far more important than sexual pulses in the unconscious (which I would rather term oblivion) as well as wideawake life, he experienced intense longing to take flight from analytic psychology into a new version of Hellenic philosophy. I believe that his soars into visions of Eros and Thanatos were efforts to get away from the struggles with the riddle of anguish, which reminded him of the lesson he learned from his father and old Samuel Hammerschlag, when they taught him the deepest doctrine of the religion he wished to forget: “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”2 His egolatry, which he called narcissism, allowed him to take from their teaching only the idea that dreams, and the life of oblivion in general, evolved from struggles with guilt.

Freud enjoyed his Jewish teachers' obsession of guilt because it gave his ego the exhilaration of responsibility, what he termed ego-autonomy. He sustained his faith in the latter despite the contradiction of his dogma that all motion occurs on account of prior propulsion. This principle of