Freud's father

Freud's father is not presented here through a continuous biography but through the work he performs in Freud's dreams: beloved and remembered, he can also become a substitute figure through whom conflicts with colleagues and anxieties about reputation are expressed. Freud reads the dead father's political elevation and the absurd account of a 1851 hospital charge as two different arrangements of family memory, ambition, grief, and professional resentment. Together, the dreams show how the father’s image can carry both genuine affection and meanings displaced onto him from elsewhere.

Identity and Place in the Dream Analyses

Freud's father is a deceased parent whose remembered life and manner of death supply material for several dreams. In the political dream, Freud recalls how like Garibaldi his father looked on his deathbed, a likeness that those present had remarked upon. The dream turns that memory into an image of the father among a crowd, taking part in Hungarian politics after death. In a different dream, the father appears alive in the next room and is asked about an apparent episode of drunkenness in 1851. Freud treats neither appearance as a literal report of the father’s actions: the father’s image is shaped by the dream’s verbal links, memories, and substitutions.

The father also occupies a wider interpretive role in Freud’s account of dreams. Freud argues that childhood feelings toward parents—including love for one parent and hostility toward the other—belong to a broader pattern of psychic life, not only to the experience of people who later become neurotic. In discussing Oedipus, he links that argument to ancient tragedy; he also compares the more repressed treatment of related material in Hamlet. The father thus belongs both to a particular family memory and to Freud’s effort to connect dream interpretation with literary and cultural forms.

The Dead Father in the Political Dream

In one dream, the father appears to play a part in Hungarian politics after his death, uniting people in a crowded assembly. Freud recalls that the dream’s small, indistinct scene resembles an illustration of Maria Theresa at the Reichstag in Pressburg, in the episode associated with the Hungarian nobles’ pledge, “Moriamur pro rege nostro”. In the remembered image, the father stands amid the crowd. The dream places him on one or two chairs, which Freud connects with the possibility that he is presiding over the assembly.

That elevation is set against the physical circumstances of the father’s final illness. Freud recalls a rise in temperature after death and his father’s increasingly flushed cheeks, then connects the dream’s language of obstruction with the severe intestinal paralysis that had troubled his father during his last weeks. These associations bring an undignified bodily memory into contact with the dream’s grand political scene. Freud’s reading does not erase the painful detail; it explains how the dream can hold it alongside the ideal of a father who remains a dignified presence to his children.

The dream’s conclusion makes that ideal explicit: Freud identifies its wish as the wish “To be a pure and great presence to one’s children after one’s death”. The father's resemblance to Garibaldi and his imagined role among political figures therefore do more than confer public stature. They help transform a memory marked by illness and mortality into a scene of lasting paternal dignity. Freud also describes the dream’s absurdity as arising from the way its phrases combine, rather than as evidence that its thoughts are meaningless.

The Father as a Cover for Professional Conflict

A second dream begins with an impossible communication from the district council of the town where Freud was born. It concerns payment for hospital accommodation in 1851, supposedly required after a seizure at Freud’s house. He dismisses the claim on two grounds: he was not born until 1856, and the father to whom the charge might refer is dead. He goes into the next room to tell his father, who remembers having been drunk and detained in 1851 while working for a firm. Freud asks whether his father used to drink and whether he married soon afterward, placing his own birth five years after the alleged incident.

Freud reads the dream’s open mockery of his father as a disguise, not as its final target. The dream followed news that an older colleague had criticized a patient’s continuing psychoanalytic treatment with Freud into its fifth year. The colleague had temporarily taken over a role once filled by Freud’s father, including responsibility for payment and hospital accommodation. As the friendship with that colleague weakened, Freud says, the professional disagreement acquired the emotional shape of conflict between father and son. The father is made the butt of the dream’s joke so that the dispute with the colleague can be carried indirectly.

The dream’s abrupt transitions provide part of its mechanism. When Freud goes to the next room, the scene shifts from the supposed 1851 episode to the memory of telling his father about his independent engagement. Freud associates that memory with his father’s selflessness and sets it against the behavior of the newer figure concealed by the father. The dream can ridicule the father precisely because, in Freud’s account, the remembered father remains a model against whom the colleague is being measured.

Meynert, Time, and the Dream’s Hidden Comparisons

The figure behind the colleague is, in another part of the interpretation, Meynert. Freud recalls that he had followed Meynert’s work with reverence, that Meynert’s attitude toward him changed from favor to hostility, and that the two later clashed over whether male hysteria existed. In Meynert’s last illness, he acknowledged to Freud that he himself had been a case of male hysteria. In the dream, however, the father’s supposed drunkenness and detention do not refer to the father’s real life; Freud connects them to Meynert’s account of using chloroform as an intoxicant when young and spending time in an institution.

The dream also turns the difference between 1851 and 1856 into a comparison about delay. Freud relates the five-year gap to the colleague’s period of support, the years he had made his fiancée wait before marriage, and the duration of the patient’s treatment. Its apparent indifference to the five-year difference allows the dream-thoughts to argue that five years need not be decisive. The number 51, however, also carries a contrary association: Freud notes that he regarded that age as a point of particular vulnerability and had seen colleagues die suddenly, including one who died shortly after receiving a professorship. The numerical details therefore gather conflicting thoughts about patience, professional recognition, and mortality under the dream’s absurd chronology.

Family Memory, Ambition, and Inheritance

The political dream also opens onto Freud’s thoughts about his children. After waking, he remembers that a continuation of the dream had been forgotten; analysis lets him reconstruct a reference to his second son. Freud had chosen the boy’s first name with a great historical figure in mind, a figure who had strongly attracted him in childhood, particularly after his stay in England. He says that he had intended to use the name throughout the pregnancy and welcomed the child with it at birth.

Freud interprets this naming and the dream’s political grandeur as signs that ambition suppressed in the father may be transferred to his children. The young boy enters the dream’s network of associations through an accident involving soiled clothes, which recalls the earlier dream’s reference to his father’s bodily condition. The recurrence links the wish for a pure, great presence to the father’s memory and to the child’s place in Freud’s hopes. Across these dreams, the father is at once a specific person remembered with affection, a measure of paternal selflessness, and a screen through which Freud’s own professional conflicts and ambitions become legible.