Rome

Rome occupies a charged place in Sigmund Freud’s dreams: at once an adversary to resist and a destination he longs to reach. The city gathers together his conflicts over religion, national identity, antisemitism, and childhood memory; after years of inhibition, Freud visited it in September 1901, following the completion of The Interpretation of Dreams.

The City as Adversary

Freud’s many dreams about Rome draw on his fondness for Italy but cast the city as a power he must oppose. He associated it with the Roman Catholic Church, which stood in his account for religious obscurantism set against his scientific outlook. Rome also carried a political charge: as a German nationalist, Freud was understood to sympathize with Bismarck’s campaign against the Church’s political authority in the 1870s. In Vienna, where antisemitism was widespread and often supported by clerical forces, the city could additionally represent the hostility directed at Jews.

This imagery connected public antagonism to family memory. Freud recalled that his father, when young, had meekly submitted to insults from a Christian passer-by. In the dreams, Rome could therefore stand not only for a distant religious or political opponent but also for the setting of an inherited humiliation. Freud cast himself against that Rome, yet the dream pattern did not make him a triumphant conqueror: he identified with unsuccessful assailants rather than with the historical forces that actually captured or sacked the city.

Desire and the Delayed Visit

Rome was not simply an enemy to be overcome. Freud wanted to go there, and the fact that he did not destroy it in fantasy mattered: the city remained desirable even while it embodied opposition. Despite repeated journeys in Italy, an inhibition prevented him from visiting Rome until September 1901. After completing The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud overcame what he considered a neurotic travel phobia and spent twelve days in the Holy City.

The desire also had a childhood association that complicates the contrast between Freud’s scientific identity and Catholic Rome. He told Wilhelm Fliess that a Czech nanny had taken him to church when he was a child, aroused sexual desire in him, and was later dismissed for stealing. The loss may have contributed to the anxiety attached to Rome and to the taboo on visiting it. This proposed connection gives the city a double significance: the Catholic world Freud opposed intellectually was also bound to a remembered childhood attachment. On later visits, Christian Rome, rather than classical Rome, particularly fascinated him.

A Dream City of Substitutions

Rome also appears indirectly in a dream in which Freud’s children flee the city. Because the dream uses places familiar to him, its scene shifts to Siena: outside the Porta Romana, Freud sits beside a fountain, sorrowful, while a woman brings two boys to their father. He is not that father. The older boy is clearly his eldest son; the other’s face cannot be seen. The woman asks the boy for a farewell kiss, but he refuses and offers his hand instead, using the expressions Auf Geseres and Auf Ungeseres.

The dream’s Rome is displaced into Siena, whose fountains provide a substitute for those Freud associates with Rome. Near the gate, the dream also presents a brightly lit house identified as a lunatic asylum. Shortly before the dream, Freud had heard of a person who shared his religion and had been forced to give up a hard-won position at a state asylum. The dream’s location thus brings together an imagined flight, a remembered or reported setback, and familiar Italian scenery rather than reproducing Rome literally.

Freud further interprets the children’s flight through a retrospective association with his own childhood. The dream, he says, expresses envy of relatives who had taken the opportunity years earlier to move their children to another country. Its Rome is consequently not just the city he wished to visit: it becomes the starting point for an imagined departure and a way to represent an earlier family comparison. The dream’s substitutions make the city’s significance mobile, carrying personal feeling into another recognizable place.

From Dream Material to Cultural Tradition

Rome’s place in the book belongs to a larger effort to relate individual dreams to inherited cultural forms. Freud reviewed earlier writing on dreams to establish the scholarly standing of his inquiry, and his discussion invokes classical authors as well as modern personal associations. That wider frame helps explain why Rome can operate simultaneously as a real destination and as a dense cultural image, shaped by religion, political history, and private memory.

The completion of The Interpretation of Dreams marks a practical change in Freud’s relation to the city: the long-inhibited journey finally takes place in 1901. Yet the change does not erase Rome’s earlier ambivalence. The city remains both the object of a wish and the emblem of forces Freud opposed, while the dreams show how a place can gather several strands of experience without reducing them to a single meaning.