Meynert

Meynert is a former intellectual authority in Freud’s life whose changing relationship with Freud returns in a dream as a disguised conflict. In that dream, Freud’s father appears to recall being intoxicated and confined; Freud identifies the figure concealed beneath his father as Meynert, whose career, hostility, and belated admission make the substitution a way of expressing what could not be stated directly.

Identity and Background

Meynert was a figure Freud had followed with great reverence. Freud’s dream presents him not by name but through the image of his father, linking Meynert to a separate set of associations about advancement, professional disappointment, and the treatment of male hysteria. The disguise matters: the dream’s father is not simply a portrait of Freud’s actual father, but a composite vehicle for thoughts about another senior figure.

Freud’s Relationship with Meynert

Freud recalls that Meynert’s attitude toward him changed after a short period of favour, turning into undisguised hostility. That reversal gives the dream’s concealed portrait its personal charge: the man Freud had once followed as a model became an antagonist. The dream does not reproduce this conflict as a straightforward account; it places Meynert behind the paternal figure and lets the disguised scene carry the memory of their rupture.

The Dream’s Disguise

In the dream, Freud’s father remembers having once been drunk and having to be locked up. Freud says that this detail does not describe his father’s real life. It points instead to Meynert, who had told Freud that as a young man he had used chloroform as an intoxicant and had consequently spent time in an institution. Freud stresses that the connection is not merely a resemblance between the two men: the disguise is also supported by a compressed conditional thought. If Freud had been the son of a professor or Hofrat, he imagines, he would have advanced more quickly; accordingly, the dream makes his father a professor and Hofrat while covering Meynert with his father’s image.

Dispute and Admission

The dream’s allusion to Meynert also recalls a bitter literary dispute over whether male hysteria existed. Meynert had denied the condition. Shortly before Meynert’s death, Freud visited him during his final illness and asked how he was; after describing his state, Meynert concluded by admitting that he had always been one of the finest cases of male hysteria. The admission astonished Freud and vindicated the position they had contested. In the dream, this episode is folded into a broader structure of disguised criticism and remembered authority: the former mentor who had resisted Freud’s argument is revealed, at the end, as a case that supports it.