Aussee

Aussee appears in Freud’s discussion as both a family holiday setting and a source of dream material. Excursions around the area furnish clear examples of children’s dreams fulfilling wishes frustrated during the day; later, the landscape returns in Freud’s own associations to a dream about clearing away waste, linking the place to his children and to his work.

Setting and Family Excursions

During the summer of 1896, Freud’s family stayed on a hill near Aussee. In fine weather they could see the Dachstein, and a telescope made it possible to pick out the Simony mountain lodge, which the children repeatedly tried to view. Freud told them that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein, encouraging their anticipation of an outing there.

On the walk from Hallstatt through the vale of Escher, one of the children, a five-year-old boy, repeatedly asked whether each newly visible mountain was the Dachstein. Freud answered that each was only a foothill. The boy eventually fell silent and refused to continue up the path to a waterfall. Freud initially took this for tiredness; the next morning, the boy cheerfully reported dreaming that the family had reached the Simony lodge. He had expected the excursion to bring them to the mountain and lodge they had discussed, and the dream supplied what the disappointing walk had not. The only further detail Freud could obtain was that the ascent involved walking up steps for six hours.

A Child’s Dream of the Lake

Aussee’s scenery also prompted a dream reported by Freud’s daughter, then three and a quarter years old. She had crossed the lake by boat for the first time, but the voyage seemed too brief: at the landing stage she did not want to leave the boat and wept. The following morning she said that she had dreamed of going on the lake. Freud presents the dream as a straightforward continuation of the wished-for boat trip, turning an outing that ended too soon into a dream experience.

Aussee in Freud’s Dream Associations

Aussee returns in Freud’s interpretation of a dream in which he urinates on a privy bench, washing away accumulated excrement. In the associations he reports, the hill and bushes in the dream belong to Aussee, where his children were staying at the time. He connects the dream’s clearing action with his claim to have discovered the childhood origins of neuroses and thereby protected his own children from illness. The setting thus places his family in the same chain of associations as his professional work and its ambitions.

The location also belongs to the circumstances surrounding the dream. After a hot afternoon lecture on hysteria and perversions that left him dissatisfied, Freud felt tired of his work and longed for his children and for Italy. His Aussee associations therefore give the dream a concrete family reference amid thoughts of professional discouragement and escape. Across these episodes, Aussee is not merely a holiday backdrop: it anchors examples of how recent experiences and frustrated expectations can reappear transformed in dreams.