Dream of clearing away feces

Sigmund Freud’s Dream of clearing away feces turns a scene of accumulated waste into a compact demonstration of dream-work. Although the manifest scene might ordinarily provoke disgust, Freud reports feeling none: its imagery serves both the dissatisfaction he brought to bed after an unrewarding lecture and a pleasurable, self-aggrandizing wish. The dream’s force lies in that conjunction. The same material carries opposing feelings, and their compromise helps explain why the dream’s emotional tone is subdued.

The Dream and Its Interpretation

The dream presents a hill with something like an outdoor privy, a long bench with a large opening at one end, and piles of excrement along its back edge. Behind the bench are bushes. Freud urinates onto the bench; the stream clears it, and the accumulated material drops into the opening, though the dream leaves a little apparently remaining. Asked why he did not feel disgust, Freud answers through the associations that followed.

The first association is the Augean stables, cleared by Hercules: Freud identifies himself with the cleaner. He connects the hill and bushes with Aussee, where his children were staying, and his own work on the childhood aetiology of neuroses with protecting them from illness. The bench recalls furniture given to him by a devoted patient and, through that gift, the honour he felt his patients showed him. Even the dream’s repellent setting acquires a more agreeable association with Italy, whose small-town lavatories Freud recalls as similar.

The stream that removes the waste expands this fantasy of power. Freud connects it to Gulliver extinguishing a great fire in Lilliput and to Gargantua directing a stream at Paris. A recent look through Garnier’s illustrations to Rabelais supplies an immediate day residue for the latter association. Freud also recalls climbing among the monsters and gargoyles on the towers of Notre Dame, a favourite place in Paris. The waste’s rapid disappearance, in turn, suggests the motto Flavit et dissipati sunt, which he says he intended to use as a heading for a chapter on the therapy of hysteria. The dream therefore links bodily cleansing with intellectual and therapeutic accomplishment, and with an imagined stature approaching that of the literary giants in its associations.

The Day’s Dissatisfaction and Its Reversal

The dream’s immediate occasion was a hot summer afternoon on which Freud delivered a lecture about the connection between hysteria and the perversions. He was dissatisfied with what he had said, felt it empty of value, and was tired of his demanding work. He longed to leave his investigations into human dirt, to be with his children, and then to enjoy Italy. His fatigue and loss of appetite followed him from the lecture hall to a café, where he tried to have a modest snack in the fresh air.

A member of the audience joined him and praised his teaching, saying that Freud had opened his eyes and cleared the Augean stable of errors and prejudices in the theory of neuroses. The compliment collided with Freud’s state of mind rather than relieving it. He struggled with his disgust, went home early to escape his admirer, read several pages of Rabelais, and then read C. F. Meyer’s novella A Boy’s Sufferings before sleep. These details give the dream’s grand associations a precise context: literary recollection and public praise entered a night shaped by dissatisfaction, exhaustion, and the wish to get away from work.

Freud explains that the daytime mood supplied nearly all the dream’s material, while an opposing mood of powerful self-aggrandizement arose during the night and took possession of it. The resulting compromise had to express both his feeling of inferiority and his overestimation of himself. Freud’s account makes the dream’s muted feeling an effect of this collision: neither pole simply disappears, and the opposition between them inhibits the emotional force each might otherwise have carried.

Dream-Work and Wish-Fulfilment

Freud presents the dream as evidence for his theory that a distressing thought can enter a dream when it also offers material for a wish-fulfilment. The remembered disgust and dissatisfaction do not, in this interpretation, refute the theory. They become available to the dream because the same material can be reorganized around a pleasurable fantasy of achievement. The dream’s imagery thus does not merely reproduce the day; it makes the day’s discouragement serve a contrary wish.

The clearing scene gathers several lines of association into one action: the work of removing waste, Freud’s claimed discovery about the childhood origins of neuroses, the audience member’s praise, the honour he associates with a patient’s gift, and literary images of exceptional power. The scene’s unresolved remainder—the suggestion that something may still be left—also keeps the dream from becoming a simple picture of completed success. Freud’s interpretation instead emphasizes its double use of the same material, as a compromise between dissatisfaction and self-estimation.

This example belongs to a broader argument about dreams and culture. Freud places dreams alongside classical authors’ reflections on their origins and on the waking concerns that shape them, and treats dream interpretation as a way of bringing apparently trivial or repellent material into relation with psychic life. In this dream, references to the Augean stables, Gulliver, Rabelais, and the Latin motto do more than decorate a private scene: they show how personal recollections and literary associations can lend a wish its representable form. Its central demonstration is not that the dream erases unpleasant feeling, but that it can admit such material by making it carry an opposed, pleasurable meaning.