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To the Editor:
In a recent letter “Fantasies About Freud's Fantasies,” Johanna Krout Tabin (1994) raises an interesting point about whether Freud quoted Rumpelstiltskin or Puck in a letter of May 16, 1896. She also attacks recent hard-won insights into Freud's “childhood memories” as “fantasies,” “guesses,” or “speculations.” She misattributes these to Masson (Freud, 1985), whom apparently for a footnote alone she ventures to publicly psychoanalyze as under a “demonic influence.” Unfortunately, her letter shows that she has missed the main point of my article (O'Brien, 1991), my research (O'Brien, 1989), Freud's (1900) theory and method of analysis, and his letter of May 16.
The starting point of all these issues is Freud's May 16th statement—“Oh, how happy I am that no one, no one knows” (Freud, 1985, pp. 243-245). Masson, in a footnote, stated Freud was here quoting Rumpelstiltskin (p. 245)—a notion I elaborated upon (O'Brien, 1991). Dr. Tabin claims Freud is here identifying with and quoting Shakespeare's Puck, a master of disguises in dreams, and wrongly presumes that therefore my interpretation of Freud is but a fantasy. Correctly, she notes that Freud's letter was “overtly” preoccupied with his “secret” of dreams.
In basing her argument on the “overt” of manifest meaning of Freud's letter, however, she demonstrates that she has missed the main point of Freud's theory and method of analysis, and of my article (O'Brien, 1991) and research (O'Brien, 1989). She fails to note, for example, how Freud's (1900) method of analysis, due to the motives and mechanisms of self-defense he described, aimed at insight into the hidden, disguised, or latent meaning of a person's thought. It discarded the overt or manifest meaning as but a distorted and misleading substitute for the person's real thoughts. In focusing on the overt meaning of Freud's May letter, she misses what Freud would have considered its real or latent meaning. In this sense, she misses its main point.
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