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Freud's Correlation with Joseph Popper Lynkeus. Fritz Wittels. Pp. 492–498.
This witty sketch contains three dreams of a man who boasted that he 'never dreamed anything nonsensical'. Brill comments on the remarkable fact that the author actually showed that dream distortion will not occur if there is compatibility of the impulses raging in the psychic life.
The story was written prior to Freud's Dream Interpretation, and Freud himself did not read Dreaming Like Waking until several years after 1899. It then prompted him to study Popper's other writings. Joseph Popper was a physicist, poet and social reformer, a contemporary of Freud, with a similar Viennese background. Ten years after Popper's death, Freud paid tribute to this original thinker with whose idealistic reformative ideas he could sympathize but not agree. In My Connection With Joseph Popper Lynkeus, Freud explained that the absence of dream distortion evidences a high degree of inner harmony, since distortion is the result of a compromise between the repressing forces and the unconscious. He suggested that such harmony might well characterize the personality of Joseph Popper as well as the ideal social order which he so passionately advocated.
Fritz Wittels, author of a book on Popper which he once sent to Freud, discusses the relationship of these two men. He quotes parts of a letter from Freud in which we find thoughts later expressed in My Connection With