on this levee; in this house

(Re)discover the fact that Freud dreamed the dream which was the foundation of his Dream Theory on July 24*, my birthday. It was a wish-fulfillment dream concerning his patient Irma. Long story, but it related in part to cocaine and fear of malpractice and, as always, men examining women. 

There is the manifest content of the dream (where the detritus of the day often goes, the residue, “that which refuses to be filed”) and the latent content (in this case “the wish”). The purpose of the dream is translation. 

The purpose of the dream is to let us keep sleeping. 

To keep us sleeping? To keep us from sleeping? 

I like to think of this as a gift Freud has given me, before birth, something small and delightful that detonates later, much later, after he is dead and I am born. (It’s the least he can do, really, bad fairy that he is.) When Freud interpreted his own dream his patient became conflated with his wife, due to a mutual pallor, or rather he was confused in the dream because Irma, his patient (who was really named Anna) was not rosy but pale and it is Freud’s wife who is pale, pale and pregnant with their last child, Anna.

My child was born on July 8, the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s war wound. He (Hemingway) was struck by a shell; fragments ended up in his thighs, a knee, a foot. Like the Fisher King. It also knocked him unconscious - dreaming? fallen into a trench in the Piave River delta.  There is a memorial near to the point of his wounding: “On this levee Ernest Hemingway, American Red Cross volunteer, was wounded the night of July 8, 1918” (but in Italian). There is something about a Yellow House, and nightmares. It was while he was recovering from his wounding, in a Milan hospital, that Hemingway met the nurse he’d fall in love with (Agnes von Kurowsky), an event which would inspire A Farewell to Arms. The Italian soldier who (undoubtedly) saved his life by being, himself, blown up has been memorialized in history simply as “an Italian soldier”, like some lesser character in a minor opera or a small figure in a Canaletto view (is that the same thing? Canaletto was born to a scene painter and started off in that trade. All landscape is staged.)

 A few years ago, a persistent (and Italian) historian tracked the Italian soldier down or, rather, tracked down his name, by process of elimination - who died, where the units were located — but Italy has strict privacy laws (like psychoanalysis) so the name is really all there is. Still, better than nothing and maybe someday he will have his own plaque. His name was Fedele Temperini which one could translate into something like “faithful pencil sharpeners” if one didn’t speak Italian, which I don’t.

An account of Hemingway’s wounding exists in A Farewell to Arms but - no surprise - he leaves the Italian soldier out. Well, maybe it’s more complicated than that. An Italian soldier dies but it’s not clear if his death in any way “saves” Hemingway/Henry, only that Henry is unable to save HIM. And Passini is not a soldier but a driver, like Henry/Hemingway.

Freud, on the opposite side of the war, displayed “youthful enthusiasm” for it, according to his biographer Ernest Jones (he was 58 at the time). Two of his sons fought (one - Ernst! - in Italy; another was a war engineer). He (Freud) wrote many of his studies during the War, since his clinical work and patients vanished almost entirely. When it was over (the war), the Austro-Hungarian Empire had disappeared (along with the Russian, German and Ottoman Empires) but his practice did pick back up.

24 june 2020

*Some sources list the date as July 24, 1895; others have it as July 23. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss he wrote, coyly, of the possibility of a marble tablet on the Schloss Bellevue which would read: “In this house on July 24th 1895 the secret of dreams was revealed…” That was five years after the dream, so it’s possible Freud himself was wrong. Regardless, Anna Freud, his daughter (and analysand!) laid this marble tablet herself in 1977.

addendum: turns out I have been enraptured by this coincidence for a long time. Below is the start of a longer piece from the late 80s.