“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept”

“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept” is the biblical phrase Freud invokes to interpret a dream of his children fleeing Rome. Drawn from Psalm 137, the words turn the dream’s fountain-side sorrow into an image of exile: Rome’s familiar fountains must be replaced by those of Siena, while the children’s imagined departure carries the weight of Jewish displacement and concern for their future.

Biblical phrase and dream image

The quotation is not merely a caption for a scene of sadness. In the dream, Freud sits beside a fountain outside a double gate in Siena, sorrowful and nearly weeping, as a woman brings two boys out to their father. The older boy is clearly his eldest son; the other child’s face cannot be seen. The biblical image of people weeping by the waters of Babylon gives this parting scene an exile-shaped resonance.

Rome, Siena, and displacement

The dream substitutes Siena for Rome: both cities are associated with beautiful fountains, but the dreamer must find a familiar substitute for Rome. Near Siena’s Porta Romana, he and his companions had seen a large, brightly lit house and learned that it was a lunatic asylum. Shortly before the dream, he had also heard that a person of his religion had been forced to give up a hard-won position at a state asylum. These associations place the dream’s movement away from Rome alongside anxieties about Jewish exclusion and insecure belonging.

The phrase’s wider meaning

Freud connects the dream’s thoughts to a play he had seen, The New Ghetto, and to concern for his children: they cannot be given a fatherland of their own, and he worries about raising them so they can move freely from place to place. The Psalm phrase thus links the personal image of a family’s flight to a wider history of displacement. Its biblical language gives voice to the dream’s mourning, while the dream’s substituted city and fountain make exile intimate and particular.