Flavit et dissipati sunt

Flavit et dissipati sunt is a Latin inscription meaning that the wind blew and the enemy was scattered. In Sigmund Freud’s associations, it binds the defeat of the Spanish Armada to scatological dream imagery and to his professional ambition: he imagines using the phrase as a heading for a chapter on the therapy of hysteria, where what has accumulated is swept away.

Historical Inscription and Associative Chain

The phrase enters an analysis through a long chain of verbal and historical associations. Freud follows the Count’s proclamation of coltsfoot through related words and insults, then to Germinal, where children are asked to bring salad leaves and a contest in producing flatus is described. From the flowers and a Spanish verse, his associations lead to Isabelita and Isabella and Ferdinand, Henry VIII, and the Spanish fleet sailing against England. After the Armada’s defeat, the English struck a commemorative medallion bearing the inscription Flavit et dissipati sunt: the storm had scattered the fleet.

That historical image does not remain a detached reference. Freud says he had half-jokingly intended the inscription as the title of a chapter called Therapy, if he ever wrote a detailed account of his conception and treatment of hysteria. A phrase celebrating a storm’s destruction of a fleet is thus redirected toward the imagined dispersal of illness.

The Dream of Cleansing

The same motto returns in Freud’s analysis of a dream about excrement. He interprets the stream of urine that washes everything clean as an allusion to greatness, linking it to Gulliver extinguishing a fire in Lilliput and Gargantua aiming his stream at Paris. In this interpretation, the dreamer’s degrading material is transformed into an extravagant image of cleansing and power. Freud connects the rapid disappearance of the excrement to the motto and again imagines it as a heading for a chapter on the therapy of hysteria.

The dream’s immediate circumstances sharpen the contrast. On a hot summer afternoon Freud had lectured on the connection between hysteria and the perversions; he found what he had said empty and displeasing, felt tired of his arduous work, and longed for his children and for Italy. At a café, an audience member praised him for clearing the Augean stable of errors and prejudices in the theory of neuroses. Freud’s mood did not match the praise: he struggled with disgust, went home early, and read Rabelais before sleep. The dream’s forceful cleansing image and the scatological motto recast that encounter with professional exhaustion and flattery as a fantasy of clearing away accumulated dirt.

Repetition and Significance

The phrase links two separate dream interpretations through a striking reversal: the Armada’s destruction is first carried into a chain of indecent wordplay, while the later dream turns bodily waste into material that can be washed away. In both cases, the motto gives a memorable form to dispersal. Its recurrence also makes the proposed chapter title more than a passing joke: it condenses Freud’s wish to present the treatment of hysteria as a cleansing operation, even as the dream shows how closely that ambition remains entangled with the dirt and disgust of his clinical work.