The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

Jews among them; so that every diligent Jewish schoolboy carried a ministerial portfolio in his satchel. The impression of that time must be
responsible for the fact that until shortly before I went to the university I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my mind only at the last
moment. A medical man has no chance of becoming a minister. And now for my dream: It is only now that I begin to see that it translates me
from the sombre present to the hopeful days of the bourgeois Ministry, and completely fulfils what was then my youthful ambition. In treating my
two estimable and learned colleagues, merely because they are Jews, so badly, one as though he were a simpleton and the other as though he were
a criminal, I am acting as though I were the Minister; I have put myself in his place. What a revenge I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to
appoint me Professor extraordinarius, and so in my dream I put myself in his place.
In another case I note the fact that although the wish that excites the dream is a contemporary wish it is nevertheless greatly reinforced by
memories of childhood. I refer to a series of dreams which are based on the longing to go to Rome. For a long time to come I shall probably have
to satisfy this longing by means of dreams, since, at the season of the year when I should be able to travel, Rome is to be avoided for reasons of
health.[13] Thus I once dreamt that I saw the Tiber and the bridge of Sant' Angelo from the window of a railway carriage; presently the train
started, and I realized that I had never entered the city at all. The view that appeared in the dream was modelled after a well-known engraving
which I had casually noticed the day before in the drawing-room of one of my patients. In another dream someone took me up a hill and showed
me Rome half shrouded in mist, and so distant that I was astonished at the distinctness of the view. The content of this dream is too rich to be
fully reported here. The motive, "to see the promised land afar," is here easily recognizable. The city which I thus saw in the mist is Lubeck; the
original of the hill is the Gleichenberg. In a third dream I am at last in Rome. To my disappointment the scenery is anything but urban: it consists
of a little stream of black water, on one side of which are black rocks, while on the other are meadows with large white flowers. I notice a certain
Herr Zucker (with whom I am superficially acquainted), and resolve to ask him to show me the way into the city. It is obvious that I am trying in
vain to see in my dream a city which I have never seen in my waking life. If I resolve the landscape into its elements, the white flowers point to
Ravenna, which is known to me, and which once, for a time, replaced Rome as the capital of Italy. In the marshes around Ravenna we had found
the most beautiful water-lilies in the midst of black pools of water; the dream makes them grow in the meadows, like the narcissi of our own
Aussee, because we found it so troublesome to cull them from the water. The black rock so close to the water vividly recalls the valley of the Tepl
at Karlsbad. Karlsbad now enables me to account for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Herr Zucker to show me the way. In the material of
which the dream is woven I am able to recognize two of those amusing Jewish anecdotes which conceal such profound and, at times, such bitter
worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our letters and conversation. One is the story of the constitution; it tells how a poor Jew
sneaks into the Karlsbad express without a ticket; how he is detected, and is treated more and more harshly by the conductor at each succeeding
call for tickets; and how, when a friend whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey asks him where he is going, he
answers: "To Karlsbad- if my constitution holds out." Associated in memory with this is another story about a Jew who is ignorant of French, and
who has express instructions to ask in Paris for the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the goal of my own longing, and I regarded the
satisfaction with which I first set foot on the pavements of Paris as a warrant that I should attain to the fulfilment of other wishes also. Moreover,
asking the way is a direct allusion to Rome, for, as we know, "all roads lead to Rome." And further, the name Zucker (sugar) again points to
Karlsbad, whither we send persons afflicted with the constitutional disease, diabetes (Zuckerkrankheit, sugardisease.) The occasion for this dream
was the proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A further association with sugar and diabetes might be found in the
matters which I had to discuss with him. -
A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last-mentioned, brings me back to Rome. I see a street corner before me, and am astonished that so
many German placards should be posted there. On the previous day, when writing to my friend, I had told him, with truly prophetic vision, that
Prague would probably not be a comfortable place for German travellers. The dream, therefore, expressed simultaneously the wish to meet him in
Rome instead of in the Bohemian capital, and the desire, which probably originated during my student days, that the German language might be
accorded more tolerance in Prague. As a matter of fact, I must have understood the Czech language in the first years of my childhood, for I was
born in a small village in Moravia, amidst a Slay population. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, became, without
effort on my part, so imprinted upon my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of its meaning. Thus in these dreams also
there is no lack of manifold relations to the impressions of my early childhood.
During my last Italian journey, which took me past Lake Trasimenus, I at length discovered, after I had seen the Tiber, and had reluctantly turned
back some fifty miles from Rome, what a reinforcement my longing for the Eternal City had received from the impressions of my childhood. I
had just conceived a plan of travelling to Naples via Rome the following year when this sentence, which I must have read in one of our German
classics, occurred to me:[14] "It is a question which of the two paced to and fro in his room the more impatiently after he had conceived the plan
of going to Rome- Assistant Headmaster Winckelmann or the great General Hannibal." I myself had walked in Hannibal's footsteps; like him I
was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania when all were expecting him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had achieved
this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies
in the Punic war not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Moreover, when I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien
race, and was forced by the anti-Semitic feeling among my classmates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still
greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized, in my youthful eyes, the struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and
the organization of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-Semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix
the thoughts and impressions of those earlier days. Thus the desire to go to Rome has in my dream- life become the mask and symbol for a
number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose realization one had to work with the tenacity and single-mindedness of the Punic general, though
their fulfilment at times seemed as remote as Hannibal's life-long wish to enter Rome. -