You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There can be little doubt of the importance Freud attached to his Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In the 1931 preface to the third (revised) English edition he stated that
This book contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime, (p. xxxii)
On page 608 of the Standard Edition volume containing The Interpretation of Dreams appears a Latin sentence taken from Virgil's Aeneid: “Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo.” It is immediately precedes one of Freud's most quoted statements: “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” On the same page, in a footnote, Strachey translates the Latin: “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” Strachey goes on to say:
Freud remarks in a note in Ges. Schriften , p. 169, that “this line of Virgil [Aeneid VII.312] is intended to picture the efforts of the repressed instinctual impulses.” He has used the same line as the motto for the entire volume [of the Interpretation of Dreams]. In a letter to Fliess of December 4, 1896 (, Letter 51) he proposed using it as a motto for a chapter on “Symptom Formation” in some projected but unrealized work. The next sentence was added in 1909….
It seems to me that a quotation Freud used twice, and intended to use three times, deserves careful scrutiny.
Jones (1953) commented about the motto “with its obvious reference to the fate of the repressed”. Although Jones did not say that he was quoting Freud in this instance, he was presumably familiar with the Gesammelte Schriften, so that his only contribution was to add