1832

The date 1832 is the chronological hinge of an absurd dream about Goethe attacking a young man. Because Goethe died in 1832, the dreamer reasons that the alleged attack must have occurred earlier, when the man was only eighteen; uncertainty about the present year then throws the calculation into confusion. The date helps expose how the dream’s impossible arithmetic brings together professional anxieties, clinical material, and the dreamer’s own history.

The impossible chronology

A dream acquaintance, Herr M., has supposedly been attacked with unjustifiable passion in an essay by Goethe and is, as the dream puts it, annihilated. Although Herr M. complains bitterly about the attack at table, his reverence for Goethe remains intact. The dreamer tries to test the story against chronology: Goethe died in 1832, which means the attack must have preceded that year. If Herr M. was then eighteen, however, he would have been exceptionally young. The dreamer cannot establish what year it is now, and the calculation collapses into darkness.

The historical date does more than mark an inconsistency. It supplies a fixed point against which the dream’s unstable arithmetic becomes visible. The dreamer counts forward from Goethe’s death, while a patient encountered in waking life had been asked to count forward from his own birth. The parallel turns a calendar calculation into a distorted replay of clinical testing.

Sources in waking life

The dream combines the imagined attack on Herr M. with a recent visit to his brother, who showed signs of paralytic insanity. The brother had exposed his sibling in conversation by referring without apparent cause to the sibling’s youthful exploits. During the examination, the dreamer asked the patient his birth date and gave him small calculations to test his memory; the patient still performed them fairly well. In the dream, by contrast, the dreamer himself cannot remember what year it is, taking on the confusion associated with the patient’s condition.

A second source was a dispute over a cruel review of a book by the dreamer’s Berlin friend Fl. The reviewer was very young, and the dreamer challenged the journal’s editor for having accepted the attack. The editor regretted publishing it but would not promise a correction, so the dreamer severed his connection with the journal while insisting in his resignation letter that their personal relations should survive the disagreement. This dispute supplies the dream’s language of annihilating criticism and its reversal of who is entitled to judge whom.

A third source was a patient’s account of her brother’s psychological illness. During a frenzy, the young man cried out, “Nature, Nature”; his doctors associated the words with Goethe’s essay “On Nature” and his studies in natural philosophy. The dreamer instead understood “Nature” in a sexual sense, a reading he connected to the fact that the young man had mutilated his genitals. The young man’s illness had begun when he was eighteen, adding another eighteen-year-old figure to the dream’s already tangled chronology.

Reversal and personal stakes

The dreamer connects these materials to Fl.’s book, which concerned the chronological patterns of life and traced Goethe’s long life to a multiple of a biologically significant number. He recognizes that the dream places him in his friend’s position: just as Fl.’s work has been harshly criticized, the dreamer expects critics to attack his own account of psychoneuroses, whose sexual etiology he maintains against the majority of physicians. The dream’s absurd reversal—Goethe attacking a young man, though a young man could more readily attack the immortal Goethe—turns the apparent confusion into irony. Its implied question is whether the critics, rather than the dreamer and his friend, are the fools.

The date therefore belongs to a broader pattern of substitutions. In one calculation the dreamer counts from Goethe’s death; in the clinical scene the patient counts from birth. The dreamer’s uncertainty about the year makes him resemble the patient, while the dream’s attack on Herr M. lets the dreamer imagine himself and Fl. under attack. He ultimately treats the friend’s cause as his own: the dream’s “he” becomes a collective “we,” and the numerical joke becomes a defense of shared intellectual and professional positions.

A formative association

The reference to Goethe’s “On Nature” also reaches back to the dreamer’s youth. Hearing the essay read at a popular lecture had helped decide him, as an unsettled school-leaver, to study the natural sciences. The date 1832 thus anchors not only the dream’s impossible sequence but a chain of associations connecting Goethe’s death, an eighteen-year-old patient, a colleague’s criticized book, and the dreamer’s own formative encounter with science. The dream makes chronology fail on the surface while using dates and ages to bring these otherwise separate concerns into relation.