Turn a blind eye

“Turn a blind eye” is an expression Freud uses to interpret a phrase in a dream concerning funeral arrangements. Its force lies in a double meaning: a request to close an eye can signify both a literal gesture and the figurative act of being forbearing. The dream’s failure to unite these meanings becomes evidence of two separate lines of thought within its content.

Meaning in the Funeral Dream

Freud connects the phrase to his decision to keep a funeral ceremony as simple as possible because he knew the departed person’s views on such events. Other family members opposed that puritan simplicity, fearing it would let the family down before the funeral guests. Against this disagreement, the dream’s request to close an eye can be understood figuratively as a call for forbearance—a willingness to turn a blind eye.

Ambiguity and Dream Structure

The expression matters because neither of its meanings cancels the other. Freud describes the dream’s haziness as expressing an “either … or”: the dream-work has not fashioned a single verbal form that successfully carries both lines of thought. Instead, those lines have already separated in the dream-content. The phrase therefore illustrates how an apparent verbal unity may conceal a structural division.

Relation to Opposition in Dreams

Freud places this example within a broader account of how dreams handle alternatives and opposites. Alternatives can be difficult to represent and may sometimes appear as two equal halves of a dream. More generally, the dream does not reliably mark contradiction with a clear negative; it may draw opposites into one image or represent an element by its wished-for opposite. The figurative meaning of turning a blind eye thus belongs to a wider problem of interpretation: a dream image may leave uncertain which of its possible poles is intended.