Dream of fleeing Rome and the Geseres farewell

The Dream of fleeing Rome and the Geseres farewell turns an apparently incoherent scene into a dense account of Sigmund Freud’s concerns about his children, Jewish identity, and the dangers of one-sided development. Its central verbal invention, “Ungeseres,” initially seems meaningless; tracing it through associations to a farewell, Jewish expressions of suffering, food preferences, Easter customs, childhood eye trouble, and a school bench, Freud makes the dream’s absurdity a method of concealment and interpretation.

The dream’s scene and setting

On account of events in Rome, children must flee the city. The setting shifts outside an ancient-style double gate, which Freud recognizes in the dream as the Porta Romana in Siena. He sits on the edge of a fountain, sorrowful and nearly weeping. A woman, described as an attendant or nun, brings out two boys and hands them to their father, though Freud emphasizes that he is not the father in the scene. One boy is unmistakably his eldest son; the other’s face is not visible.

The woman wants the eldest boy to kiss her goodbye. Instead, the boy refuses the kiss, offers his hand, and says, “Auf Geseres”; to the woman and Freud, or perhaps to one of them, he adds “Auf Ungeseres.” Freud’s dream records that the second phrase seems to express a preference. The expected farewell would have been “Auf Wiedersehen.” The departure, the fountain, and the words thus combine recognizable images with a verbal exchange that demands explanation.

Rome, displacement, and family concern

Freud traces the scene to a play he had recently seen, Das neue Ghetto, and identifies several concerns gathered into its latent thoughts: the Jewish question, the future of his children, and the absence of a fatherland that could be theirs. He also worries about raising them to move freely from place to place. The dream’s flight from Rome gives these concerns a dramatic shape, while the sorrowful father-like figure and the departing children make separation its emotional center.

The dream substitutes Siena for Rome in a way Freud links to remembered travel. Rome is known for its fountains, and the fountains of Siena provide a familiar equivalent within the dream. Near Siena’s Porta Romana, Freud and his companions had seen a large, brightly lit building and learned that it was a lunatic asylum. Shortly before the dream, he had also heard that someone of his religion had been forced to surrender a position he had secured at a state asylum. These details connect the dream’s borrowed setting to professional exclusion and Jewish vulnerability, rather than leaving Rome and Siena as decorative scenery.

How the farewell words open the associations

Freud identifies Geseres as a genuine Hebrew-derived word, from goiser, which he renders as suffering imposed on someone or destiny; in Jewish slang it can suggest weeping and wailing. Ungeseres, by contrast, is Freud’s own coinage. The dream’s hint that it is preferable to Geseres gives him a path into the associations: unsalted caviar is preferred to salted caviar, and the phrase “Caviare to the general” carries a joking allusion to a younger member of his household whom he hopes will one day care for his children’s future. The attendant or nun, meanwhile, is recognizable as the family’s nanny.

A further verbal link supplies the missing step: salted and unsalted caviar lead to leavened and unleavened bread. Freud connects unleavened bread with the Israelites’ flight from Egypt and the Easter observance that recalls it. That association leads to a walk the previous Easter in Breslau with his Berlin friend. A little girl had asked Freud for directions; unable to help, he remarked that he hoped she would later choose her guides more wisely. Soon afterward he saw a physician’s sign bearing the name Dr Herodes and joked about whether the doctor was a children’s specialist. His friend, meanwhile, was discussing the biological significance of bilateral symmetry and imagining a Cyclops with one eye in the middle of its forehead. The farewell’s strange wordplay has by now gathered religious memory, family responsibility, a physician’s name, and the problem of having one eye rather than two.

The school bench and the fear of one-sidedness

The route back to Geseres passes through an earlier eye complaint suffered by Professor L.’s son while he was at school. A doctor had warned that the problem would be serious if it spread from one eye to the other. When signs appeared in the second eye, the boy’s frightened mother summoned the doctor to their country lodging. He dismissed her alarm with the question, “What sort of a ‘Geseres’ are you kicking up?” and predicted that, as the condition had improved on one side, it would improve on the other. It did.

That boy’s school bench later passed from his mother to Freud’s eldest son, the boy who speaks the farewell in the dream. Freud therefore connects the dream child not only to his own family’s future but also to the story embedded in the inherited object. The bench was designed to protect a child from becoming short-sighted and one-sided. Physical one-sidedness consequently becomes a figure for intellectual development as well. The dream’s two opposing words can be heard as a balance: after bidding farewell to one side, the child calls up its opposite, as though observing bilateral symmetry. Freud’s explanation brings the dream’s nonsensical exchange back to the concrete concern that prompted it.

Absurdity as a form of expression

Freud presents the dream’s apparent madness not as proof that its thoughts are meaningless, but as a disguise through which uncomfortable material can be voiced. He compares this to a figure in a play who must pretend to be a fool: listeners can tolerate forbidden speech if they can laugh it away as the utterance of a fool. The dream’s witty, unintelligible word-games similarly allow serious concerns to appear in a form that looks absurd.

This reading fits Freud’s broader account of dreams as culturally and psychologically significant rather than trivial. He places the analysis within a tradition that includes classical writing about dreams, and argues elsewhere that childhood wishes and conflicts connect individual dream material to literature, including the stories of Oedipus and Hamlet. Here, however, the argument is carried by unusually specific domestic and verbal links: the fleeing children, the nanny, the family’s hopes, the transferred school bench, and the word Geseres remembered from a medical scare. The dream’s final significance lies in the contrast between its comic surface and the seriousness of the anxieties it organizes: the future of Freud’s children, their ability to navigate the world, and the risk—bodily or intellectual—of becoming one-sided.