PARTISAN REVIEW
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learn to speak without Indignation of what we call the sexual
perversions.... The uncertainty in regard to the boundaries of
what is to be called normal sexual life, when we take different races
and different epochs into account, shou ld in itself be enough to
cool the zealot's ardor. We surely ought not to forget that the
perversion which is the most repellent to us, the sensual love of a
man for a man, was not only tolerated by the people so far our
superiors in cultivation as were the Greeks, but was actually en–
trusted by them with important social functions .
We can put this assertion into one of its appropriate contexts by recalling
that the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde had taken place only five
years earlier. And the man who is speaking out here has to be regarded as
the greatest of Victorian physicians, who in this passage is fearlessly
revealing one of the inner and unacknowledged meanings of the famous
"tyranny of Greece over Germany." And as we shall see he has by no
means reached the limits beyond which he will not go.
How far he is willing to go begins to be visible as we observe him
sliding almost imperceptibly from being the nineteenth-century man of
science to being the remorseless "teller of truth," the character in a play
by Ibsen who is not to be deterred from his "mission." In a historical
sense the two roles are not advent itiously related, any more than it is
adventitious that the "truth" that is told often has unforeseen and
destructive consequences and that it can rebound upon the teller. But we
see him most vividly at this implacable work in the two great dream
interpretations, which are largely "phonographic" reproductions of dra–
matic discourse and dialogue. Very early on in the analysis of the first
dream, Freud takes up the dream element of the "jewel-case" and makes
the unavoidable symbolic interpretation of it. He then proceeds to say
the following to this Victorian maiden who has been in treatment with
him for all of maybe six weeks.
"So you are ready to give Herr K. what his wife withholds from
him. That is the thought which has had to be repressed with so
much energy, and which has made it necessary for everyone of its
elements to be turned into its opposite. The dream confirms once
more what I had already to ld you before you dreamt it -- that
you are summoning up your old love for your father in order to
protect yourself against your love for Herr K. But what do al l these
efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you
are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to
yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply
you love him."
He immediately adds that "naturally Dora would not follow me in this
