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It would be hard to wriggle out of the admonishment that an attachment to psychoanalysis always happens more for personal than for intellectual reasons. After all, the great founding text of the new “science,” The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), had at its center a set of dreams dreamt by its author, Sigmund Freud. Of few, if any, other sciences could it be asserted that the dreams of its originator not only motivated it but actually constituted its scientific credentials. Freud's achievement here is really quite extraordinary: at a time in which the scientific revolution was paying off in ferocious advances in knowledge and technology, and science itself was perhaps at its most esteemed, Freud came along and announced that its source was a set of dreams. And behind these dreams are all sorts of peculiarities, including embarrassing ones. For example—perhaps the most egregious one—an element in one of Freud's central dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, the “Count Thun” dream, is traced back to a memory of urinating in his parents' bedroom and being faced by an irate father who declares, “the boy will come to nothing.” This paternal injunction flatly contradicted Freud's mother's endorsement of him as special—”Goldene Sigi”—and clearly rankled with him through much of his life. Freud comments, “This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams and are always linked with an enumeration of my achievements and successes, as though I wanted to say: ‘You see, I have come to something’” (p. 216). Given that Freud also declared The Interpretation of Dreams to be “a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death” (p.xxvi), it takes little imagination to see that this founding text of