Freud’s failure to be appointed professor extraordinarius supplies the immediate conflict behind his analysis of the dream in which his friend R. becomes his uncle. The disappointment does more than prompt a wish for professional advancement: in Freud’s interpretation, the dream turns the appointment’s power relation upside down, placing him in the position of the minister who had declined to promote him. As he continues the analysis, he discovers that this reversal draws force from much older hopes of public distinction.

The Appointment and the Dream

Freud had already interpreted the dream’s affection for R. as a defiant answer to slanders by two colleagues. Yet that explanation did not satisfy him. In waking life, he judged those colleagues differently, and the desire not to share their fate in the appointment seemed too weak to account for the dream’s intensity. The unexplained ambition therefore became a clue: the dream’s emotional force exceeded what the immediate professional slight alone could explain.

The appointment’s importance is thus both practical and symbolic. Freud recognizes that the dream makes him a different kind of figure from the physician and analyst he is in waking life. Its imagined elevation offers compensation for a decision made by an authority above him, while the dream’s treatment of the colleagues converts professional frustration into a more sweeping assertion of power.

Childhood Sources of Ambition

Freud traces the dream’s ambition first to a story repeated in his childhood: an elderly peasant woman had supposedly prophesied to his mother, delighted by her first-born child, that she had brought a great man into the world. He then recalls a second prophecy, which made an even clearer impression. When he was eleven or twelve, his parents took him to an inn in the Prater, where an improvising poet was invited to their table. Before receiving a subject for his verses, the poet addressed the boy and predicted that he might one day become a minister.

That memory is anchored in the political climate of the Bourgeois Ministry. Freud’s father had brought home portraits of middle-class academics who held office, and the family had illuminated their home in their honour. Because some of these figures were Jewish, the episode made political authority appear accessible to an industrious Jewish boy. Freud also remembers that, until shortly before entering university, he intended to study law and changed direction only at the last moment: the medical profession, as he observes, could not lead to a ministerial career.

Reversal and Political Meaning

The dream, Freud concludes, carries him from the troubled present back to the hopeful period of the Bourgeois Ministry. It revives the wish for advancement that he had formed then, and places him in the role of the minister. In the dream’s treatment of his two learned colleagues, Freud sees himself acting as if he possessed the authority to judge them; this becomes a thorough revenge on the official who had refused him the professorship.

The reversal does not establish that Freud had a settled political career in view. Rather, his account shows how an early image of public power could be displaced into the dream’s professional drama: the unfulfilled ministerial ambition returns as a fantasy of academic and political authority. The appointment disappointment therefore connects immediate resentment to a childhood expectation of greatness, while the dream turns exclusion into an imagined position from which Freud can decide who rises and who is denied.