Some Dreams of Descartes': A Letter to Maxime Leroy

Editor's Note

(a) French Editions:

1929 Brief an Maxim [sic] Leroy: Über Einen Traum Des Cartesius In Leroy's Descartes, le philosophe au masque,  1,  89-90, Paris:  Editions Rieder. (In French.)

1934 Brief an Maxim [sic] Leroy: Über Einen Traum Des Cartesius G.S., 12,  403-5. (Reprint of Freud's letter and extracts from Leroy's book. In French.)

1948 Brief an Maxim [sic] Leroy: Über Einen Traum Des Cartesius G.W., 14,  558-60. (Reprint of above.)

The present translation, the first into English, is by Angela Richards.

No German original of this letter is extant. The French version was almost certainly made by Leroy, and it provides at best an unsatisfactory basis for the English translation.

While Maxime Leroy was preparing his book on Descartes (1929), he submitted a series of the philosopher's dreams1 to Freud for his comments. We cannot tell exactly what account Leroy gave Freud of the dreams, for the German editions do not print the text of his actual letter but merely quote the description of the dreams from Leroy's published volume, in which he also printed his translation of Freud's reply to his enquiry.

Descartes' original account and interpretation of the dreams seem to have occupied the opening pages of a manuscript known as the ‘Olympica’, which was probably written during the winter of 1619-20 and which is now lost. It was, however, seen by the seventeenth-century abbe, Adrien Baillet, who published a paraphrased translation, containing some quotations from the original Latin, in his Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (Paris, 1691, 1). The account of the dreams is on pp. 81-5. It is on this version that Leroy based his account, but it seems certain that Freud studied Baillet's full text, since, for example,

Freud speaks in his reply of ‘the melon from a foreign land’— a phrase whi