SANDRA M. GILBERT
451
Sigmund Freud had a dream
that~
as his self-analysis revealed,
depended heavily on details borrowed from
She.
In
this dream,
Freud wrote, he had been given a strange task that
related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my
pelvis and legs, which I saw before me as though in the dis–
secting-room.... Finally I was making a journey through
a changing landscape with an Alpine guide who carried me
[part of the way]. The ground was boggy; we went round the
edge; ... Before this.! had been making my own way forward
over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise
that I was able
to
do so well after the dissection. At last we
reached a small wooden house at the end of which was an
open window. There the guide set me down and laid two
wooden boards, ... so as
to
bridge the chasm which had
to
be crossed over from the window. At that point I really be–
came frightened about my legs, [and] awoke in a mental
fright.
As Freud himself rather dryly remarks, "a full analysis of
this dream" would take up quite a number of pages, but he does
undertake a partial explanation, which, significantly, empha–
sizes the influence of imagery drawn from
She ,
a work he calls "A
strange book ... full of hidden meaning.... The eternal femi-
nine, the immortality of our emotions... " and which, as one
critic has recently argued, may have helped him conceptualize
the psychic geography that was to be so crucial to his theory of
"layered personality." What are we to make, though, of the fact
that Freud's Haggardesque adventure begins with a pelvic dis–
section that implies a desexing and that his journey ends in feel–
ings of impotence and terror? Like Leo and Holly, who have to
be carried on litters into the womb/ tomb that is Her land, Freud
seems to have been castrated and infantilized early in this dream,
so that when he is borne inward over slippery, boggy ground, it
is hard, given his own hermeneutics, to avoid seeing his journey
not as a classic trip into the self but as a voyage into the other,
and specifically into an other who is horrifyingly female. His
final despairing vision of "the chasm which had to be crossed"
would inevitably, then, lead to a sense of failure and "mental
fright," not because (as he suggests) he wonders how much
