The Dreyfus Affair appears in Sigmund Freud’s account of dreaming as a recent political impression condensed into a stark image of isolation: a man on a steep rock in the middle of the sea, associated with Captain Dreyfus on Devil’s Island. Rather than narrating the affair in full, the book uses its highly charged outcome as dream material and as evidence in an argument about how the previous day enters a dream.

Political Context

The note identifies Charles-Alexandre Dupuy as a French politician elected President of the Chamber of Deputies on 5 December 1893. During his first week in office, the anarchist Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb at him. Dupuy calmly continued the session, and the note recounts his response: ‘The session continues, gentlemen.’ It also places Captain Dreyfus’s exile on Devil’s Island during Dupuy’s later period as Prime Minister, from May 1894 to January 1895. The reference thus connects the affair to a wider political setting marked by public violence and the exercise of state power.

The Dream Image

In the dream material, the image is of a man standing on a steep rock in the middle of the sea, in the style of Böcklin. Freud gives its source as Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, alongside news about his relatives in England. The book supplies no further account here of Dreyfus’s trial or the circumstances of his exile; its focus is the transformation of a recent impression into a dream image. The rock and surrounding sea make separation visible, while the accompanying mention of relatives in England brings distance from family into the same cluster of associations.

Place in Freud’s Argument

Freud asks whether a dream must relate to the preceding day or may instead draw on impressions from a longer stretch of the immediate past. He argues that apparent examples from two or three days earlier can be traced to a recollection of them on the previous day: an intervening act of remembering reconnects the older experience to the dream-day. He therefore maintains that every dream has a stimulus drawn from experiences on which the dreamer has not yet slept. The Dreyfus image supports this account by showing how news of an exile, recalled in the immediate present, can furnish material for a dream without becoming a literal replay of the political event.