Easter

Easter is not merely a calendar marker in these analyses: it anchors remembered journeys whose details become material for dream interpretation. A walk in Breslau helps Sigmund Freud trace a chain of verbal and personal associations around “Geseres” and “Ungeseres,” while a recent Easter trip to Aquileia contributes to a dream whose apparent alarm conceals a different emotional source.

Breslau and the chain of associations

During an Easter walk through the unfamiliar streets of Breslau, Freud and his Berlin friend encountered a little girl who asked him for directions. Unable to help, Freud remarked that he hoped she would later have a keener eye in choosing whom to ask for guidance. Soon afterward, he saw a physician’s sign bearing the name Dr Herodes and joked that he hoped the colleague was not a children’s specialist. His friend, meanwhile, had been discussing bilateral symmetry and imagining a single eye in the middle of the forehead, like a Cyclops.

In the dream analysis, these recollections connect with the phrase “My son, the myope” and with the word “Geseres.” Freud traces the latter to an episode from years earlier: the son of Professor L. had suffered an eye complaint that first affected one eye and then showed signs of spreading to the other. When the frightened mother summoned the doctor to her country lodging, the physician rebuked her for making a “Geseres” of the matter and predicted that the second eye would recover just as the first had. It did.

From Geseres to Ungeseres

Freud treats the dream’s contrast between “Auf Geseres” and “Auf Ungeseres” as an associative puzzle. He identifies Geseres as a Hebrew-derived word associated with suffering or destiny, while Ungeseres is his own coinage. The dream’s closing suggestion that Ungeseres is preferable prompts a comparison with unsalted caviar, preferred to salted caviar, and a joking allusion to a younger member of his household whom he hopes will one day care for his children. The household’s nanny also appears, Freud says, in the dream as an attendant or nun.

A further link supplies the transition between salted and unsalted, and Geseres and Ungeseres: leavened and unleavened bread. Freud associates unleavened bread with the Israelites’ flight from Egypt and its continuing observance at Easter. The holiday memory thus joins a sequence of wordplay, household references, medical recollection, and religious association; the dream’s apparently nonsensical opposition becomes intelligible through the links that analysis recovers.

Aquileia and the warship dream

A few weeks before another dream, Freud had taken a short, enjoyable Easter trip to Aquileia with his brother. That journey remained vivid alongside other Adriatic travel memories, including Miramare, Duino, Venice, and Aquileia. The dream combines these places with contemporary concern about the naval war between America and Spain and the fate of Freud’s relatives living in America.

The dream distributes emotion in a strikingly misleading way. The governor’s death makes no impression on Freud in the dream, whereas the sight of a warship fills him with terror. Analysis reverses the apparent allocation: Herr P., whom Freud takes as a substitute for himself, stands in for the dying governor, and the underlying distress concerns what would become of his relatives after his untimely death. The fear attached in the dream to the warship belongs instead with this thought of death and family.

The warship image itself derives from a cheerful memory in Venice the previous year. Freud and his wife had stood at the windows of their room on the Riva Schiavoni, looking across the blue lagoon on a day when English ships were expected for a ceremonial welcome. His wife joyfully announced that the English warship was coming; in the dream, the same words accompany alarm. The contrast shows how a dream can detach an affect from its original occasion and attach it elsewhere, turning remembered joy into fear. Alongside the Breslau walk, the Easter journey to Aquileia belongs to the book’s larger demonstration that ordinary travel memories can enter dreams in altered combinations, carrying meanings that only analysis discloses.