“The best that you can know you cannot tell the children”
The Interpretation of Dreams“The best that you can know you cannot tell the children” is a line from Goethe that Freud recalls in explaining a dream’s relation to his struggle to publish the results of self-analysis. The phrase gives memorable form to the conflict between making intimate knowledge public and holding it back; in the dream, that conflict is transformed into the image of dissecting his own body.
Wording and Context
Freud writes the German line as “Das Beste, was Du wissen kannst, darfst Du den Buben doch nicht sagen” and supplies the English rendering “The best that you can know you cannot tell the children.” It occurs in his reflection on a conversation with Louise N., who asks when his latest insights will become readable. Her question prompts him to recognize that someone else is speaking through her, warning him; he falls silent and thinks of the effort required to publish his work on dreams, which obliges him to surrender so much of his innermost self.
Relation to the Dream
Freud connects the line to the dream’s task of dissecting his own body. He interprets that task as an image of the self-analysis involved in relating his dreams: the body becomes a figure for the private material opened up by analysis and publication. The line therefore does not merely recommend silence. It marks the pressure exerted by knowledge that is difficult to communicate, even as the dream and its interpretation make that knowledge the subject of disclosure.
Publication and Withholding
The phrase sharpens a paradox in Freud’s account. Publishing the work means exposing intimate material, while the remembered line names a limit on what can be told. Freud links the line to his struggle to publish his book on dreams and notes that the further thoughts prompted by his conversation with Louise N. go too deep to become conscious; they are diverted through associations awakened by Rider Haggard’s novels. The phrase thus stands at the point where the wish to speak meets both silence and the dream-work’s indirect route.
