Augean stables

In the dream analysis, “Augean stables” names both the errors Freud believes he has cleared from the theory of neuroses and the degrading labor from which he longs to escape. The allusion to Hercules thus turns an image of filth into a figure for professional achievement, while exposing how praise and disgust, self-doubt and self-aggrandisement converge in the dream.

The classical allusion and the dream

Freud associates the dream’s outdoor privy and heaps of excrement with the Augean stables cleared by Hercules. He identifies himself with the hero: his discovery of the childhood aetiology of neuroses, he reasons, has protected his own children from illness and cleared away errors and prejudices in the theory of neuroses. In this interpretation, a task of cleaning becomes an image of scientific work and its presumed benefit.

The expression also gathers less flattering and more personal associations. The bench recalls a piece of furniture given to Freud by a devoted patient, and so evokes the honour his patients show him. The excrement, which disgusts him, recalls Italian towns and their toilets. The dream’s stream of urine then carries an allusion to greatness: Freud connects it with Gulliver extinguishing a fire in Lilliput and with Gargantua directing his stream at Paris. Read together, the associations make the act of clearing the privy at once a triumphant feat and an extravagant image of power.

The occasion for the expression

The dream followed a hot summer afternoon on which Freud had delivered a lecture about the connection between hysteria and the perversions. He was dissatisfied with what he had said, found it empty of value, and felt tired and unrewarded by his arduous work. He longed to leave the labor of investigating human dirt, to be with his children, and to return to the beauties of Italy.

At a café after the lecture, one of his listeners joined him while he drank coffee and struggled to eat a roll. The listener praised what he had learned from Freud and said that Freud had cleared the Augean stable of errors and prejudices in the theory of neuroses, calling him a great man. The compliment therefore supplied the expression directly, but met a mood hostile to it: Freud struggled with disgust and went home early to escape the admirer.

From daytime conflict to dream compromise

Before sleep Freud read pages of Rabelais’s illustrations and a novella by C. F. Meyer, Die Leiden eines Knaben (A Boy’s Sufferings). The novella brought childhood scenes into the dream’s material; the lecture, the café encounter, and the day’s dissatisfaction supplied much of the rest. The phrase “Augean stables” thus connects the external praise to Freud’s own account of exhausting work among the symptoms and causes of neuroses.

Freud interprets the dream as a compromise between the day’s disgust and dissatisfaction and an opposing, powerful self-aggrandisement that emerged during the night. The same material had to express both an estimation of himself as inadequate and an overestimation of himself as a hero who cleanses a field of error. Their mutual inhibition produces, in his account, an ambiguous dream with muted feeling. The expression matters because it holds those contrary meanings together: professional labour appears at once repellent and heroic, while the praise that names achievement also intensifies the conflict the dream must negotiate.