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‘The psychology is proceeding in a strange manner; it is nearly finished, as if in a dream…’
From December 1897 to February 1898, Freud gradually resumed his work on dreams. He came up with some new ideas on psychoanalysis and psychology. His relationship with Fliess began to be of paramount importance.
Freud's new ideas were as follows: myths, legends and religious beliefs are all projections into the outside world of our ‘dim inner perception’ of the psychical apparatus ( 286); this was to be one of the main ideas of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and of Totem and Taboo. Masturbation is ‘the primary addiction’ for which the other addictions (alcohol, morphine, tobacco) are merely substitutes ( 287); I quoted this passage in its entirety in connection with the cocaine episode (p. 44, n.1). Happiness is given a psychoanalytic definition: it is ‘the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish,’ in other words an infantile wish; wealth does not bring happiness, because money is not the object of such a wish ( 294).
Freud's most important new idea concerned the anal stage: ‘the most disparate things are readily united as an obsessional idea under a single word with multiple meanings. The tendency toward breaking through makes use of these ambiguous words as though it were killing several flies at one blow’ ( 287). Freud provides two examples of this from his own