1856

1856 is the year Sigmund Freud gives for his birth and the hinge of a dream in which chronology is deliberately compressed. Set against 1851, the year associated with his father’s supposed detention, it turns a five-year interval into evidence for Freud’s insistence that time spent waiting need not count as wasted time.

The year in the dream

In the dream, Freud receives a communication from the district council of his birthplace demanding payment for hospital accommodation in 1851, supposedly after a seizure at his house. The date makes the demand absurd: Freud had not yet been born, and his father, the possible subject of the claim, was already dead. When Freud goes into the next room to tell his father, the father remembers being detained after becoming drunk in 1851. Freud then asks whether he married soon afterward and calculates that he was born in 1856, apparently following the earlier year in quick succession.

The dream’s false chronology depends on treating 1856 as if it followed 1851 almost immediately. Freud says the calculation is a false conclusion serving wish-fulfilment: the underlying thought is that four or five years are no time at all and do not count. The date therefore functions not simply as biographical information but as part of the dream’s argument about waiting.

The biographical interval and its substitutions

Freud links the five-year span to several separate experiences. It is approximately how long he enjoyed the support of an older colleague before their relationship weakened; it is also how long he made his fiancée wait before they married. The dream carries the same interval into the present, where Freud is making a patient close to him wait for a complete cure. Its compressed movement from 1851 to 1856 gathers these different delays into a single claim: what has taken years may yet come right.

The father in the scene is not, Freud argues, the true target of the mockery. The dream uses him as a stand-in for the older colleague who had criticized the patient’s continuing psychoanalytic treatment into its fifth year. By making the father the butt of an apparently open dispute, the dream can conceal its disagreement with the colleague; Freud interprets the remembered year of his birth as part of a defense of the treatment’s duration.

A number with opposing meanings

The dream also detaches 51 from the century and gives the number another association. Freud connects 51 with an age at which, in his observation, men seemed especially vulnerable; he recalls colleagues who died suddenly, including one who died only days after being appointed professor. The dream’s number thus carries a meaning opposite to the reassurance attached to the five-year interval: while four or five years can be dismissed as negligible waiting, 51 recalls the possibility that time may run out.

Freud further explains that the dream’s apparent reasoning reproduces material from his thoughts rather than creating a reliable inference. The sequence from his father’s supposed marriage in 1851 to Freud’s own birth in 1856 resembles an admissions official’s questioning of students about their date of birth and father’s name. In this reading, 1856 belongs to a dream that turns dates into an argument, while exposing how its apparently logical conclusion is assembled from separate associations.