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crucifixion. This “way” is commonly commemorated in Catholic churches, especially on Good Friday. The commemoration involves what are called the “Stations of the Cross,” in which the sufferings of Jesus (an “impecunious Jew”) on Good Friday are remembered and identified with. Here Freud was expressing an unconscious identification with Jesus, as he was, in his dream, thrown out at a succession of “stations.” This was one of the very few instances of Freud’s identifying with Jesus, or any “suffering servant.” Freud vastly preferred more clearly successful figures.
The historian Carl Schorske proposes the same significance for the “via dolorosa” in his discussion of the Rome dreams. He comments, “The lofty vision of Moses-Freud seeing Israel-Rome ‘from afar’ had its lowly analogue in the picture of the little-jew-Christ-Freud reaching Carlsbad-Rome on a via dolorosa.”142 Schorske claims that all the Rome dreams “suggest, in one form or another, redemption or fulfillment that is never achieved…a longing for an assimilation to the gentile world that his strong waking conscience—and even his dream censor—would deny him.”143 I want now to bring in a dream and its interpretation that Velikovsky overlooks, but whose anti-Jewish and implicitly pro-Christian aspects have been spotted by the psychoanalyst Oehlschlegel144 and by Schorske.145 The dream concerned Freud’s uncle with the yellow beard.146 I introduce it here to exemplify the concept of wish-fulfillment. The particular concern of Freud was to show that in the dream “we find the child and the child’s impulses still living on.”147 Thus he was proposing that this dream showed his own childhood impulses. Freud’s interpretation was that the impulses behind the dream content were derived from his intense ambition to be promoted to full professor. The dream expressed his rivalry with two of his colleagues who were Jewish and also up for promotion. Freud admitted that (in the dream) he maltreated his worthy colleagues merely because they were Jewish; One he represented as a simpleton, the other as a criminal. Freud concluded his analysis by mentioning that he had behaved as if he were the government minister in charge of making the promotions: “I had put myself in the Minister’s place.”148 Oehlschlegel claims that in this dream Freud was revealing his rejection of his Jewishness and an identification with the Gentile minister. Jones pooh-poohs Oehlschlegel, but without providing any serious rebuttal of her position.149 Oddly enough, despite Freud’s repeated references to his strong desires for promotion (desires that have been termed “pathological”150), Jones, in rejecting Oehlschlegel, makes the unsupportable claim that “worldly advancement meant very little to him.”151 There Oehlschlegel’s neglected interpretation might have remained, were it not that recently the same conclusion has been independently reached |