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stimulated by a real event that the poet's unconscious understood to be in
his hero's mind.
Again, I am not going to pursue the validity of the Oedipal theory,
whose assumptions have been at the center of many controversies. But I
am convinced that this theory could have been formulated only by some–
one like Freud, and in the Vienna of the turn of the century, in this
ambiance of ambivalences. There, sexual promiscuity met up with rigid
traditionalism; the display of aristocratic pretensions was simultaneous
with strong currents of democratization; the wide array and vivid specta–
cles of literary and artistic talents were matched by scientific advances in
medicine and physics, in economics and technology. These contradictions
were crying out for a unifying explanation. Many found it in a variety of
socialisms, and it is not accidental that after Freud's
Interpretation oj Dreams
attracted followers, many among them were eager to fuse psychoanalysis
with Marxism. Freud, however, linked everyone's universalist dreams to his
own. But, instead of finding salvation in religion, his modern Everyman
would locate it in his own psychic origins.
As we know, and as Freud repeatedly stated, he did not discover the
unconscious, the poets had known of it all along. He, however, set out to
investigate its origins in relation to the structure of the human mind, and
therefore postulated that psychoanalysis was a science. As Schorske main–
tains, Freud, in his self-analysis, was struggling with the Austrian
socio-political reality-as a scientist and Jew, and as a citizen and son. He
structured
The Interpretation of Dreams
as a scientific treatise, wi th each
chapter and section systematically presenting an aspect of a dream and its
interpretation. Underneath this methodically arranged narrative lies
Freud's unconscious self. Via his professional, political and personal strug–
gles, we reach the realm of his instincts-his responses to the indignities of
having to wait for a professorship for seventeen years rather than the cus–
tomary eight, the insecurities caused by the political vulnerability of Jews,
and corning to grips with the death of his father. In the process, Freud
established that a disguised dream always fulfills a suppressed wish-by
means of a few selected dreams. He then elaborated on the importance of
infantile experiences-in this case the exhilarating hopes liberalism had
held out during his childhood-on later development. In sum, Freud's dis–
covery of psychoanalysis established the centrality of sexuality in every
child's early years. And his metaphysical elaborations on the topic,
promised more apolitical resolutions for the problems facing all liberals.
So far, I have focused on the Vienna of one hundred years ago. But
because psychoanalysis, as we know it, has flourished in the U.S., it
behooves me to mention, briefly, the American intellectual soil that would
nurture it later on.
