8 Commentary on ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’225

Freud begins this study (1910) with a quotation from The Interpretation of Dreams in which he says:

The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.

I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work's singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel … We obtain from [the crucial passages] the astonishing information that the behaviour of the dream-work which I have just described is identical with a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.

Freud quotes Abel, who says:

Now in the Egyptian language, this sole relic of a primitive world, there are a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other …

In view of these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning … it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there was a large number of

225. Freud (1910b)

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words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite. (K. Abel).

The quotation from K. Abel continues:

Of all the eccentricities of the Egyptian vocabulary perhaps the most extraordinary feature is that, quite apart from the words that combine antithetical meanings, it possesses other compound words in which two vocables of antithetical meanings are united so as to form a compound which bears the meaning of only one of its two constituents … So that in these compound words contradictory co