The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sigmund Freud · a book of prose in seven chapters, argued through the analysis of dreams, the author’s own among them · published by Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, in November 1899, the title page dated 1900, and revised by its author through eight editions to 1930 · scored on Freud’s German as he last left it, the eighth edition of 1930, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German and Latin quoted only where the words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and James Strachey’s translation read alongside for sense
Mode
Prose of thought: a treatise whose evidence is narrative, the analysed dream told and taken apart, and whose method is confession conducted as argument
Mythos
The descent to Acheron of the epigraph; Oedipus made the structure of every family, and Hamlet the guilty son who hesitates; Joseph before Pharaoh; Hannibal before Rome; the navel of the dream, where interpretation reaches into the unknown
Phase
Vienna in the 1890s, from the specimen dream of the night of 23 to 24 July 1895, under a Catholic monarchy and the memory of 1848; revised through the editions to 1930
Presentation
Seven chapters: the literature on dreams, the method shown on one dream, the wish, distortion, the material and sources, the dream-work, and the psychology of the dream-processes; footnotes, added dreams and a section on symbolism from the later editions
Register
Clear, ironic and tactful scientific German, narrating its instances with a novelist’s eye for the telling detail, plain even in speculation, rising in a few places to grandeur
Scale
The sleeping mind and its underside, the body, the family from the infant’s wishes to the dying father, sexuality, the rivalries of Viennese medicine, politics, antiquity and literature, each entering through a dream
Governing Proposition
A Viennese neurologist of forty-three, who held no chair, sets out to show that dreams, which the science of his day took for the noise of a sleeping brain and the dreambooks of the people for messages, have a meaning, and that the meaning is the dreamer’s own. He shows it on his own dreams, set down and then taken apart phrase by phrase in associations that run into his ambitions, his envies, his quarrels with colleagues and with his father’s memory, and he builds from them a law: the dream is the disguised fulfilment of a suppressed wish, and the work that disguises it, condensation, displacement, representation and revision, belongs to a mind divided against itself. The wager of the book is that what we hide we also show, that the wishes of childhood persist under the adult, and that a confession conducted as an argument can serve as evidence.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book stands under a line of Virgil: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (Aeneid VII.312)
“If I cannot bend the powers above, I will move the underworld.” The epigraph is a programme. The powers above are the waking mind and the science that took the dream for noise; the underworld is what the dream comes from and what the book means to stir. Everything that follows is a descent, from the surface of a remembered dream to the apparatus beneath it, and the reader is told at the threshold where the road goes.
The work is Die Traumdeutung, published by Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, in November 1899, with the title page dated 1900, in a first printing of six hundred copies. Freud revised it through eight editions, in 1900, 1909, 1911, 1914, 1919, 1921, 1922 and 1930, adding footnotes, dreams and a long section on symbolism, and from the fourth to the seventh editions he printed with it two essays by Otto Rank, on the dream and poetry and the dream and myth, which he withdrew in 1930. The desk scores the book as he last left it, the eighth edition, which is the book as read in German and in the Standard Edition. The first edition is context; the later accretions are part of the one work and are credited or charged to it.
It is on the literature desk as prose whose writing is the work. Its thought is weighed through its form; its figures and the myths it makes or uses under The Archetypal Deep; its pressure on literature and on thought together under Pressure on Tradition. Its failures as science are not ignored: they are charged where they bear, on what it discloses and on the law that holds it together. What the twelve score is the book’s force as written argument: the analysed dream as narrative, the confession as evidence.
Movement II
The first chapter surveys the scientific literature on dreams to about 1899, and the later editions updated it only by notes. It is a duty performed, and the book could spare most of it: its results are restated at the opening of the chapters that follow. The book begins in earnest with the second chapter, where the method is shown on one dream, dreamt on the night of 23 to 24 July 1895: the dream of Irma’s injection. Freud sets it down, then takes it apart phrase by phrase, following each element into what it calls up in him.
The specimen is chosen against its author. Its associations lead into a physician’s guilt, the failures and rivalries of his profession, and the dream’s strangest detail, the formula for trimethylamine. A man who proposes a science of the mind offers as his first evidence a dream that shows him at fault. The confession is the experiment, and the form of the whole book is set here: instance, association, reassembly into a thought.
Here too the book marks its own limit. A dream, it says, has a spot where interpretation reaches into the unknown: the navel of the dream, “Nabel”. The image concedes that the method does not reach bottom, and it has become a figure for reading itself. The interpretation of a single dream has already become a theory of how any text holds more than its surface shows.
Movement III
The third chapter states the thesis plainly: the dream is the fulfilment of a wish. It begins where the thesis is easiest to see, in the plain dream of a thirsty night. The fourth chapter meets the objection every reader brings, the dream that is painful or that refuses what the dreamer wants, and turns it into the book’s strongest evidence. The pleasure is hidden because the wish is forbidden; the dream is distorted by a censor; and the formula follows that the dream is the disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish.
The butcher’s wife is the turn made flesh. She brings Freud a dream of a supper, a smoked salmon in it, in which her wish is refused. The analysis finds the wish in the refusal: she wishes not to have her wish, and the dream grants that. The story is told with tact and irony, the telling detail kept and the rest let go, and it is where the book’s method and its prose are most nearly one. It has been reread ever since for what Freud did not see in it.
The fifth chapter turns to the material and sources of dreams: the recent and indifferent material, the infantile material beneath them, the stimuli of the sleeping body, and the typical dreams that many dreamers share. Among the dreams the book follows into its dreamer’s life are those of the botanical monograph seen in a shop window, of Uncle Josef, of Count Thun, and of Non vixit. Here the subtractive test begins to bite. The typical dreams run on past need, and the footnoted dreams of colleagues in the later editions add instance without argument.
Movement IV
Among the typical dreams are the dreams of the death of those we love, and here the book makes its largest claim. The death-wishes against parents and siblings are childhood’s, and they persist. The Oedipus of Sophocles is read as the fate that might have been ours, the play moving us because it shows a wish we share; Hamlet follows in the same passage, reread as the hesitation of the guilty son. The passage rises to a cold grandeur about destiny and the reader, and what began in a footnote has carried a doctrine. Ernest Jones grew a book from it.
The fifth chapter also holds the son’s shame and the ambition it fed. The father’s cap is knocked into the gutter, and the son’s shame feeds an ambition that takes for its figure Hannibal before Rome. The Rome dreams carry the pathos of a thwarted pilgrimage, the city longed for and not reached. Count Thun, the memory of 1848 and the ambition of a Jewish student under a Catholic monarchy enter the book through the same door. A treatise on dreams is also a document of Viennese politics and of the antisemitism its author lived under, and later readers, Schorske above all, have read it so.
The sixth chapter, the longest, sets out the dream-work: condensation, displacement, the means of representation, considerations of representability, representation by symbols, absurd dreams, the affects and secondary revision. It is the grammar the century took from the book. It is also where the book is most crowded: instance piled on instance, and the section on symbols, largely of the editions from 1909 to 1914, with its fixed meanings for umbrellas and staircases, pulling against the method of individual association on which the book was founded. The law is wide; here its seams show.
Movement V
The seventh chapter opens on the burning child. A father sleeps; his son, dead, appears to him and says: “Vater, siehst du denn nicht, daß ich verbrenne?”
“Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” In the next room a candle has in fact fallen on the body. It is one of the great uncanny pages of its century, and the book sets it at the head of its most abstract chapter, so that the theory begins at a deathbed.
From there the chapter builds the apparatus the whole argument requires: the forgetting of dreams, regression, the place of the wish, arousal, the primary and secondary processes, the unconscious and consciousness. It is speculative construction kept plain, and it is where the book’s influence on later thought is deepest: Derrida read its model of the mind as a scene of writing. The book calls the dream the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious, and it has passed into speech under that phrase. The descent the epigraph promised is complete: from one remembered dream to the structure of a divided mind.
The preface to the second edition says what the book had been for its author: a part of his self-analysis, his reaction to his father’s death. Fathers stand at the book’s turning points: the father of the burning child, the father whose cap went into the gutter, the dying father who resembles Garibaldi. Freud judged late in life that an insight of this kind comes once in a lifetime. The closing paragraph turns from the past to the future, and finds the wish moulding the future into the likeness of the past: the book’s last figure for what it found.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. The method is shown on one dream in the second chapter, the thesis stated in the third, the objection from unpleasant dreams answered by distortion in the fourth, the sources gathered in the fifth, the mechanisms set out in the sixth, and the seventh builds the apparatus that must exist if all this is true. Remove any of these and the argument has a hole. The subtractive test fails in three places, and they hold the axis at 7.8: the survey of the earlier literature in the first chapter, a duty performed whose results the later chapters restate; the symbolism section of the later editions with its catalogues, and the colleagues’ dreams in the footnotes, which add instance without argument; and the typical dreams and examples that run on past need. Perhaps a fifth of the book could go without loss of what it knows.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and in its human part it holds: the mind’s products that seem senseless have sense; the self is opaque to itself and works to remain so; the wishes of childhood persist under the adult and press for expression; what we hide we also show, displaced and condensed. The formula of the fourth chapter, that the dream is the disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish, gives it its shape, and the reading of the death-wishes against parents and siblings in the fifth discloses family feeling far beyond its clinical claim. The charge is real: the thesis that every dream fulfils a wish does not hold as universal, and Freud himself had to make room for traumatic repetition in 1920, and much of the mechanism is asserted rather than shown. The disclosure of self-concealment holds; the science partly does not.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The book is exposition, and most of it is level: argument, instance, objection, answer. That level country is what holds the axis at 7.8, the lowest of the deep axes. It rises in a handful of places, and there it rises high. The burning child that opens the seventh chapter, the dead son appearing to his sleeping father to say “Vater, siehst du denn nicht, daß ich verbrenne?”, while in the next room a candle has in fact fallen on the body, is one of the great uncanny pages of its century. The passage on Oedipus and Hamlet reaches a cold grandeur about destiny and the reader. The preface to the second edition, naming the book as a reaction to the death of Freud’s father, and the closing paragraph, on the wish that moulds the future into the likeness of the past, both rise. Frequent for a treatise; rare for a book on this desk.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Myth is built here, not evoked. The Oedipus of Sophocles is made load-bearing: the book turns a play into the structure of every family, and that structure carries its account of death-wishes and of typical dreams, and later a whole doctrine. Hamlet is reread in the same passage as the guilty son who cannot act. The book also builds its own myth of descent: the epigraph’s Acheron, the dream as underworld, the interpreter as Joseph before Pharaoh, the self-analyst as Hannibal before Rome, the son shamed by his father’s cap knocked into the gutter. The navel of the dream, “Nabel”, the spot where interpretation reaches into the unknown, has become a figure for reading itself. Held below the top because the myths are bent to one pattern, and the archetype is asserted as law where the great literary works let it stand as particular.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was double: the dreambook of the people, from Artemidorus to the interpreters of omens, which read dreams as messages by a key, and the science of 1899, which read them as the noise of a sleeping brain stirred by the body. Freud turned from both: the dream has a meaning, but the meaning is the dreamer’s own and is reached through his associations, not through a key. The stake was large and was paid. A Jewish neurologist of forty-three without a chair published his own dreams with their ambitions, envies, resentments of colleagues and fantasies of eminence, and exposed himself as evidence; the book was coolly received and sold slowly. Its form, argument conducted through confession, had no precedent in scientific writing. It stops short of the very top because the symbol key of the later editions leans back toward the dreambook it left.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The form is the method: one dream set down, then taken apart phrase by phrase in associations that run into the dreamer’s life, then reassembled into a thought. Change the form, give the theory without the analysed dreams, and the book loses its evidence and its demonstration; Freud’s own short version, Über den Traum (1901), shows how much thinner the argument becomes. The book also enacts what it describes. Freud breaks off analyses for discretion and says so, so that the text has a censor of its own, and its secondary revision shows in its seams. The movement from the single instance of the second chapter to the apparatus of the seventh is an argument from surface to depth made by the order of the chapters. Held at 8.4 because the survey and the accreted catalogues are container rather than instrument, and eight editions have made parts of the form an archive.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence, not promise: a century and a quarter of re-examination by readers who agree on little else. Erik Erikson’s reading of the Irma dream (1954); Ricoeur’s De l’interprétation (1965); Lacan’s return to the dream-work as a rhetoric, condensation as metaphor and displacement as metonymy; Derrida’s “Freud et la scène de l’écriture” on the model of the seventh chapter; Carl Schorske’s reading of the political dreams in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (1980); Didier Anzieu’s study of the self-analysis; and a steady flow of feminist and historical rereadings of Irma and the butcher’s wife. The book yields as theory, as autobiography, as a document of Viennese politics and antisemitism, and as a theory of reading, and its dreams are reread for what Freud did not see in them. Semantic and formal depth both continue to yield.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is German prose and European thought at the turn of the twentieth century, and the literature that followed. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what a mind, a text and a life could be taken to mean, and supplied a century with a hermeneutic of suspicion and a grammar, condensation, displacement, censorship and wish, by which any text could be read against its surface. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Breton’s Surrealist manifesto (1924) and Les Vases communicants (1932), which argue with this book directly; Surrealist painting and film, Dalí and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou; Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Thomas Mann’s essays on Freud; Auden’s elegy for him; Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), grown from the passage on Hamlet; the psychoanalytic criticism of Trilling; Bloom’s anxiety of influence. The delayed reach in literary theory is credited. Reach in psychology proper has receded.
Score: 9.3 / 10
A span of some hundred and twenty-six years. The text survives whole, revised by its author and preserved in every state, from the first edition to the eighth. Presence is continuous: translated into the major languages, by A. A. Brill (1913), James Strachey (1953), Joyce Crick (1999) and others since; taught in literature, philosophy and the history of science; and quoted, the dream as “Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten”, the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious, above all. The figure is not the widest because its presence is now more historical and humanistic than practical: psychology reads it as history, and much of its reading is in the academy. The charge is light, since its general reading has never lapsed. The book has outlived the neurology and the Vienna that made it, which is this axis’s test.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Freud’s German is among the clearest scientific prose of its language, and he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930. The analyses are narrated with tact, irony and a novelist’s eye for the telling detail: the butcher’s wife who wishes not to have her wish, the smoked salmon supper, the botanical monograph in a shop window. The argument is managed with skill: objections are anticipated and turned, as in the fourth chapter, where the unpleasant dream becomes the strongest evidence for the thesis it seemed to refute. The seventh chapter is speculative construction kept plain. Held at 8.4: the first chapter is dutiful prose, the sixth piles instance on instance, the later footnotes clog the page and break its first rhythm, and the book in the large is less finely made than its best sentences. The sound of the German beyond what is judged here is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs a wide range. Wish, censorship and dream-work explain the plain dream of a thirsty night in the third chapter, the family hatreds of the fifth, the absurd dreams of the sixth, the reading of Oedipus and Hamlet, and the model of the mind in the seventh; the most distant elements, Freud’s political humiliations and the theory of primary process, obey the same law. Two fault lines are charged. The symbol key, fixed meanings for umbrellas and staircases, sits uneasily with the method of individual association on which the book is founded: Freud says symbols must be used with the dreamer’s associations, but the catalogue pulls the other way. And the wish thesis, stated as universal, is strained by the anxiety dream and the punishment dream, which the book absorbs by ingenuity more than by law. The coherence is real and wide; its seams show.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a book of prose of thought can hold, and it holds many orders in one structure: consciousness and its underside; the body and sleep; the family, above all father and son, from the infant’s wishes to the dying father who resembles Garibaldi; sexuality; the professional world of Viennese medicine with its rivalries and failures, Irma, Fleischl, Brücke; the state and politics, Count Thun, the revolution of 1848, the ambition of a Jewish student under a Catholic monarchy; history and antiquity, Rome, Hannibal, Oedipus; and literature itself. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through a dream and is held by the one theory. What it does not hold: labour beyond the bourgeois profession, the natural order beyond the body, the sacred except as displaced wish. A broader world than most single books, narrower than the great novels.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Bottomless Well at 9.2, and The Swerve and The Imperishable at 9.1. A book that gave a century its hermeneutic of suspicion and its grammar for reading under the surface, carried into Surrealism, Joyce and literary theory; reread for a hundred and twenty-five years by readers who find in it theory, autobiography and a document of Vienna; a turn from both the dreambook and the science of its day, paid for by an author who made himself the evidence; and a text whole in every state its author left it.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.8: a spine required from the second chapter to the seventh, but a survey, a symbol key and a run of instances that perhaps a fifth of the book could lose; and a level expository country that rises only at the burning child, Oedipus and Hamlet, the father’s death and the close. Above them, The Inner Law at 8.3, a wide law with seams at the symbol key and the anxiety dream; and The Living Form and The Made at 8.4, a form that is the method, made less finely in the large than in its best sentences. The sound of Freud’s German beyond what is judged here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Swerve at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6, and is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung, published by Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, in November 1899, the title page dated 1900, scored as one work on the German original as Freud last left it, the eighth edition of 1930 (Gesammelte Werke II/III): seven chapters, with the footnotes, added dreams and the section on symbolism of the later editions credited or charged to the work. Otto Rank’s two essays, printed with the fourth to seventh editions and withdrawn in 1930, are not part of it. The book is scored as written work, its thought weighed through its form. No text was in hand and nothing was measured. German and Latin are quoted only where the words are certain, the epigraph, the burning child’s words, “Nabel” and “Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten”, with the desk’s plain English beneath; chapters are cited by number, and everything else, the formula of the disguised wish included, is paraphrase. Translation · James Strachey’s translation in the Standard Edition (volumes IV and V, 1953), with its variorum notes, was read alongside the German for sense, and A. A. Brill’s (1913) as a second sight; Joyce Crick’s Oxford translation of the first edition (1999) is named as context. None is quoted, and nothing in them is charged to the book. The rhythm of Freud’s German sentence is not argued line by line. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the final text in pages and words, how long the first printing took to sell, and Freud’s own remarks in letters on the first chapter, are not given; the late judgment that such an insight comes once in a lifetime is given in substance, not quoted.