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In 1930 Freud was awarded the “Goethe Prize” founded by the City of Frankfurt. His address, delivered by his daughter Anna at the ceremony in the house where Goethe was born, concluded: “Goethe was not only, as a poet, a great self-revealer, but also, in spite of the abundance of autobiographical records, a careful concealer.” This very same observation may justifiably be applied to Freud himself: to prove his scientific explorations he never spared himself and yet kept his inmost core secret.
Many an analyst followed in his footsteps by using psychoanalysis in the service of biography. There seems no greater challenge than to investigate Freud's own life in this way. Amongst others, Herbert Lehmann took it upon himself to “demonstrate new connecting threads in the ‘weaver's masterpiece’ spread between the instinctual endowments, the experiences
and the works“ of Freud himself (quoted from the same address).
In an earlier paper Lehmann suggested that the recurrent dream of the yellow lion, a favorite childhood toy of Freud's mentioned in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” is autobiographical. Now he expands into a fuller examination of the meaning and importance that the lion may have had in Freud's life and for his work.
Lehmann cites several examples to show that “more than once Freud seemed to identify the psychoanalyst with the lion,” and not a few instances “where, in the substance or the content of Freud's work, traces of this lion from earliest childhood can be found.” Lehmann's perspicacity and acumen sum up to an impressive and convincing picture of the eminent role the play of childhood may have had “in the dreams of the maturing scientist to be represented at the centre of his most important discovery.”
Yet, a few comments may be in order.
Freud wrote that the dream of the yellow lion was of the “recurrent” type, and he introduced the dream with the statement: “I am able to add to the familiar examples of such dreams a few from my own records, though I never m