Freudian slips and others

I am leafing again through the book in which Freud gave the most complete account of the phenomenon known (after him) as the Freudian slip. First published in 1901 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's a collection of essays that was probably better-known and more widely read in Freud's lifetime than any of his other works.
    In my favorite local used bookstore, a shelf elf placed a copy of an elderly Macmillan edition, with A.A.Brill's translation, in my line of sight. The paper label on the spine had rubbed nearly away, like the label on a well-soaked bottle of wine, so I had to pull the book off the shelf to see what was facing me, which begins to sound like a Freudian joke in itself.

    The merits of Freud's study of slips of the tongue and memory lapses are threefold. First, he assigns meaning to incidents that many of us tend to overlook. Forgetting the name of a town where you once stayed, or giving the wrong name to someone you know perfectly well, isn't simply a memory lapse or passing confusion; it speaks of something in you and your life situation which merits close attention, because you can learn from it. Second, Freud does dreamwork with these incidents, applying the same principles of analysis to episodes in waking life as he applies to dream symbols. Third, his prime lab rat, first and last, is himself. Like Jung (and unlike lesser scientific minds that fail to realize that knowledge is state-specific) he knows that understanding begins with self-knowledge, and that the most important data on inner events (and their interplay with outer events) must be gathered from first-hand experience.

    We follow Freud down some interesting trails as he studies such phenomena as forgetting names and otherwise well-known phrases and word substitution. He recounts a chance encounter with a fellow-traveler on a train who begins to quote the famous line, in Latin, in which Queen Dido of Carthage issues a terrible curse against Aeneas, the hero who loved her and left her. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625). "Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger."
    In the days where a good education still required Latin, Freud's educated companion would be expected to get the quotation right. But he cannot recollect the harmless indefinite pronoun aliquis. By the end of a long conversation in which Freud guides his travel companion through the free association process he also applies to patients' dreams, they understand that there may be deep significance to the suppression of a seemingly harmless pronoun. In aliquis the speaker now recognizes the echo of "liquid" and "liquefaction" in the Latin word. This reminds him that he's alarmed that his girlfriend may have missed her period. He's scared that he is the "someone" who will be cursed if he abandons his girl and a baby he doesn't want.

    Now we come to the defect in Freud's approach to Freudian slips, which he called Fehlleistungen, which means "faulty actions" or "misperformances.". He wants to insist that word-amnesia and name substitution are related to "disturbing complexes" that prompt the psyche to seek to repress memories and information that may cause us pain. We hear of a man who simply cannot remember the name of a business partner who stole his girlfriend and married her; he just doesn't want to know. Freud can't remember the name of a town he knows well (Nervi) when treating a neurotic at a time when he himself is feeling nervous and may be heading for a migraine.

    While Freud's theory of repression may apply to some of his examples, there's both more and less going on with our slips and memory lapses than he allows for. Common sense tells us that memory gaps can be the result of all sorts of life factors, from fatigue to drug or alcohol abuse to migraine to information overload. Einstein once made people laugh because, asked for his phone number, he had to look it up in the book. He declared that he had so much on his mind that he didn't need to burden it by adding the need to remember things he could easily look up.

    I am generally pretty good with names, so when I call someone I know by a name that isn't their own I pay attention to what may be showing through my slip, In one of my workshops, I kept calling a man "Michael" though I was perfectly well aware that his name was "Don." Finally I asked, "Who's Michael?" Through tears, he explained that Michael had been his partner for many years; Michael had died but Don felt him close and was actually wearing his sweater that day.

     One of my rules for life navigation is: Notice what's showing through your slip. To which I will now add: And don't tag it a Freudian slip until you've explored what else may be going on. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, where you will find more on the game of noticing what's showing through a slip.

Photo: RM at Freud's last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens Hampstead

Freud among his "old and grubby gods"

When the young Freud visited the Louvre for the first time, he felt he had walked into a dream. He could not get enough of the "Assyrian kings, tall as trees, holding lions like puppies" and their tremendous winged guardians. He was captivated by the Egyptian rooms. Here, among the ancient statues, he discovered a passion that became one of his ruling drives for the rest of his life. He longed to possess these mysterious and potent images. While no apartment within his means could ever hold a lamassu or a full-size Sekhmet, there were smaller versions available, of the kind the ancients kept as talismans, life-protectors, and vehicles for daily communion with powers of the invisible world made visible through the makers' arts.
    Freud became a dedicated collector of antiquities, haunting the shop of Robert Lustig, the foremost dealer in Vienna, using every holiday or conference abroad to ransack other stores. This was the great age of the tomb robbers, and Freud had no qualms about purchasing what had been taken out of Egypt or Greece or Etruscan lands by questionable means. Tutankhamon's tomb was opened in 1925, and Freud was able to buy a piece from that. In his seventies, he declared that if he only had enough money, he would like take on the complete excavation of a new archaeological site. He considered himself an archaeologist of the mind, but he would have liked to be an archaeologist of the earth as well,
    The rooms reserved for his consulting and study in the apartment at Berggasse 19 where he lived with Martha and their many children for decades struck visitors as a museum, indeed an over-stuffed museum. On her first visit in 1933, the feminist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was stunned by the immense number of items, above all statuettes. Freud had a battalion of gods and goddesses arrayed on his desk. As he talked, he would handle them and sometimes choose one to hand to a patient. He passed H.D. a statue she did not immediately understand. Its general shape made her think of a lotus, with the stamen rising within the petals. It was an ivory carving of Vishnu standing below the five cobra heads of a serpent, a piece commissioned by the Psychoanalytic Society of India to honor Freud - and the only Hindu statue in his collection.
    His favorite, among all his treasures, was a little bronze statue of Athena. "She is perfect," he told H.D., "but she is missing the spear." No doubt he saw a sexual metaphor, in the context of his theories. But Athena was more to him than that. All his "old and grubby gods" - as he once called them - were more than anything explained in his theories. There, on his desk, was a head of Osiris. It had been severed from the body of a bronze statue and was missing the jeweled eyes as well as the high crown. Nonetheless, Freud explained to visitors, this was his "Answerer", the one who answered his deepest questions. Here, was Isis, rather formally posed as she suckled her child, a queenly and hieratic mother. Here were falconed-headed gods like the ones that Freud saw in a childhood dream that stayed with him, carrying his mother to the gates of the Netherworld. Here was the Chinese figure of a scholar before an exquisitely carved jade screen, an alter ego from a culture that Freud understood incompletely.
    I had heard about Freud's art collection, but nothing I had read prepared me for the amazing sight of his army of gods and sacred beings on display in his last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead when I visited in 2011. Whatever you think you know about Freud, prepare to be taken in deeper and unexpected directions. I felt an eager desire to understand the relations of the great psychoanalyst - who gleefully called himself a "godless Jew" - to all these idols and magical artifacts. Nothing in his collection (except the fakes that escaped detection by his keen eye and those of his friends at the Kulturhistorisches Museum in Vienna) was made simply for the sake of art and ornament. These statues were regarded as "breathing images" (as the Greeks put it); some part of the deity or daimon represented was believed to have taken up residence.
    Freud's greatest compulsion, second only to the addiction to chain-smoking cigars that killed him, was his collection. Later in life, he insisted on having the entire collection carefully boxed and sent by train to join him and his family on their long summer vacations. He would bring favorite statues, and new acquisitions, to the dinner table. He was forever talking to his little gods, stroking them, handling them. He knew that they were alive, though this sentiment did not fit very readily into his secular humanism. He denied or ignored the one God, but he lived among many gods. In his feelings, he was quite at home in the pagan world. After visiting the overgrown site of the Forum in Rome for the first time, he wrote that he was perfectly prepared to worship at the ruined temple of Minerva.
    When H.D. called on him in London, in the year before his death, she was amazed that he still had most of his gods, over 2,000. How did he manage to keep them out of the clutches of the Nazis who now ruled in Vienna? “I did not bring them," he told her. "The Princess had them waiting for me in Paris, so that I should feel at home there.” The Princess was Marie Bonaparte, his patient and patron. With the help of a friend at the museum, who gave an appraisal of Freud's collection that grossly undervalued its worth, she had helped to pull the strings that got the Reich bureaucracy to let Freud leave with his gods as well as his family. H.D. found gardenias, Freud's favorite flowers, and had them delivered with a card that read, “To greet the return of the Gods.”
     Freud's collection included many objects from Egyptian tombs, not only statues of gods but shabti representing bound spirits expected to work for the dead, mummy cases and painted mummy bandages. He surrounded himself with evidence of cultural beliefs in the soul's survival of death, while strongly suggesting that he did not personally believe in an afterlife. I suspect that he knew better in his dreams, especially when the "breathing images" came alive, as the ancients expected and prayed for them to do.
     Freud's ashes were placed in a superb red-figured Greek urn from the 4th century b.c.e., one of many gifts from the Princess. His wife Martha's ashes joined him there after her death. On the vase is the image of Dionysus, a god who dies and comes back, with a maenad, one of his ecstatic female worshippers. An interesting choice of a resting place. On New Year's day,2011, robbers tried to steal the vase from Golders Green Crematorium, where it was on public display. They did not succeed, but caused major damage to the urn. It is not clear what exactly happened to Freud's ashes. 

~

There is an excellent book on Freud and his collection by Australian art historian Janine Burke. The first (Australian) edition is titled The Gods of Freud (Sydney: Knopf, 2006). It was republished in the U.S. as The Sphinx on the Table. It amounts to a top-notch biography of Freud seen through the art that spoke to him. The most vivid account of his relations with his "old and grubby gods" is H.D.'s Tribute to Freud, essentially a narrative of and reflection on her five-times-a-week sessions with Freud in Vienna in 1933-4. H.D.'s classical education and knowledge of the myths and the sites made her a fascinating conversation partner for Freud, the collector. For other intriguing and lesser-known aspects of Freud's life please see my book The Secret History of Dreaming.

At top: Sigmund Freud at his desk. 1914 etching by Max Pollack.
Below: RM at Freud's last home in Hampstead

For a journey inside Freud's relationship with his gods,please see my story "A God of Freud" in Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm.

The dream diagnosis Dr Freud missed

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams he gives a lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses her condition with several doctors.

     His work with this dream, by Freud’s own account, led him to invent psychoanalysis. He wanted a “marble tablet” to be placed at the house where he analyzed the Irma Dream, with the following inscription:

IN THIS HOUSE, ON JULY 24th, 1895,
  THE SECRET OF DREAMS WAS
REVEALED TO DR. SIGM. FREUD

 The tragic irony is that in all his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that could have saved his life. Dr. José Schavelzon, a cancer surgeon who is also a psychoanalyst has concluded, after careful review of Freud’s personal medical records, that the Irma Dream contained an amazingly exact preview of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years later.

The night before the dream, Freud received a visit from a junior colleague, “Otto”, with whom he was in the habit of sitting up playing tarok (a card game related to Tarot) and smoking cigars. They discussed the case of “Irma”, whom Freud had been treating for hysteria. Freud was irritated when Otto reported, “She’s better, but not quite well.” He spent part of his evening writing up Irma’s case history.

He then dreamed that Irma arrived in a large hall where he was receiving guests. He immediately took her aside and told her. “If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.” She was pale and puffy, and told Freud she was suffering dreadful pains, especially in her throat: “It’s choking me”. Freud was alarmed, and began to fear he had been missing “some organic trouble” in his approach. He took Irma to a window and peered into her mouth. He had a hard time getting it open because “she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures.” When he got a good look inside, he found very disturbing symptoms – “a big white patch” inside the mouth on the right side, and also “extensive whitish grey scabs.” Freud gave an oddly specific description of these scabs; they reminded him of “the turbinal bones of the nose.”

He called for a second opinion on his patient. His senior colleague Dr. M. appeared looking pale and clean-shaven, repeated Freud’s examination, and gave a positive prognosis; there was certainly an “infection” but “the toxin will be eliminated.” Another medical colleague, Leopold, was less confident; he found infection had spread to the patient’s left shoulder and that there was “a dull area low down on the left.”

The dream scene became a medical gathering. Freud’s associate Otto was there too. All four doctors – including Freud himself – had no doubt of the origin of the patient’s illness. Otto had given her an injection of “a preparation of propyl, propyis…propionic acid…trimethylamin”. Freud saw the formula for the last chemical printed in heavy type, underscoring its importance. He concluded his dream report: “Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly…And probably the syringe had not been clean.”

In commenting on his dream, Freud began by noting that he had been thinking and writing about his patient the night before. Yet this left the content of dream totally mysterious to him, since his actual patient did not have symptoms anything like the ones that concerned him in the dream. “Constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness. I wondered why I decided upon this choice of symptoms in the dream but could not think of any explanation at the moment.”

Freud wondered whether Irma, in his dream, was actually a stand-in for another patient, who had experiences of choking. Freud’s analysis wandered off through many other associations. When he pondered the names of the chemicals in his dream, he recalled a conversation in which a colleague suggested that trimethylamin might be an element in sexual arousal. This carried him away into “Freudian” thoughts about the probable source of hysteria in sexual frustration.

He wrapped up his interpretation of his Irma dream by declaring that it was a text-book example of wish fulfillment in dreams. He had been jarred the night before by Otto’s suggestion that his patient had not been fully cured. In his dream he got his “revenge” on Otto by establishing that her pains were Otto’s fault, not his own.

In all his discussion of “substitution” – how a dream character may stand in for another person, or several other people – he paused for only a heartbeat to consider the possibility that the real patient might be the dreamer himself. He wondered whether the “scabs” that resembled nasal structures could be a warning to him about the possible effects of his excessive use of cocaine – but moved briskly on from that thought without considering other substances and their possible effects.

Twenty-eight years after the Irma dream, Freud’s oral surgeons were looking at the precise symptoms he had dreamed – in Freud’s own mouth.

Early in 1923, a surgeon performed an excision of a cancerous growth resembling the “big white patch” on the right side of Irma’s mouth “at the right anterior palate.”

In a series of surgeries and treatments over the next fifteen years, Freud’s doctors worked to excise “proliferative papillary leukoplakia” inside his mouth resembling the unusual “scabs” in the 1885 dream. His many surgeries produced further scabs.

     In the Irma dream, the patient had difficulty opening her mouth. After Dr Pichler performed radical surgeries on Freud late in 1923, Freud - like the patient in his dream - had to wear "dentures", actually a removable prosthesis. Because Freud developed lockjaw during his multiple surgeries there was often difficulty inserting the prosthesis. Towards the end of his life, there were times when he “could not open his mouth.” 

     The reference to structures of the nose in the 1895 dream report may have been a preview of Freud's condition after surgery left the nasal cavity visible from the oral cavity.

     What about all the doctors who figure in the Irma dream? Stripped of their pseudonyms, they were medical colleagues who gave Freud differing advice on his smoking habit.  “Dr  M”, who gives a cheerful but wrong prognosis for the patient, was  actually Dr Joseph Breuer, a friend and mentor who was persuaded by Freud - despite misgivings - to drop his opposition to Freud's heavy cigar smoking.

   “Leopold” was a “slow but sure” medical colleague who had cautioned that smoking could contribute to serious diseases.

   “Otto” was Oskar Rie, a friend who shared Freud’s taste for cigars and may have brought him a gift of cigars the night before the dream.

    Whether Freud’s dream doctors represented aspects of himself – or their actual personalities and positions – their role in the dream held up a mirror to the dreamer’s behavior and attitude. Unfortunately, he was able to see in that glass only darkly.

   Freud thought the syringe (the German word also means “squirter”) was a penis and that the cure for the patient's symptoms was sexual intercourse. But a “dirty syringe” could also be a nicotine delivery system - one of the cigars Freud was almost certainly smoking the night before. All the chemicals named in the Irma Dream are found in cigar smoke. Though trimethylamin is not regarded as a carcinogen, when mixed with nitrites in an acidic environment (such as the smoker's mouth) it can be “nitrosated” into a very toxic carcinogen, dimethylnitrosamine (DMNA).

     The evidence suggests that Freud’s dream gave him a rather exact picture of both the origin and the histology of the oral cancer that subjected him to a painful and protracted death. Although Freud became interested in the idea that dreams can contain messages from the body, he missed this one - unlike Jung, who gave up smoking because of a dream.

     An important question for our understanding of the nature of diagnostic dreams is whether the Irma Dream may have contained a warning message from inside Freud’s cellular system, as it was at the time of the dream. In other words, could the Irma dream have been a “tumor marker”? It is possible that a single affected cell could trigger a dream, sending a distress signal out via neighboring cells, or via the endocrine system, that was shaped into a dream by the production company in the brain.

Freud may have paid an enormous penalty for forcing his own dreams to run along narrow-gauge rails of interpretation. Since the bigger story of the Irma Dream has such large resonance for dream interpretation, it seems appropriate that the pseudonym Freud chose for his patient means “universal”.

Somehow this tragic episode has escaped most of the legion of students and biographers of Freud. It suggests that Freud may have paid a terrible price for ignoring both the premonitory and the somatic aspects of dreams, and it offers a cautionary message for all of us as dreamers: let’s remember to check for diagnostic content in dreams.

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. All rights reserved.

Dr Freud's slips, and others

I am leafing again through the book in which Freud gave the most complete account of the phenomenon known (after him) as the Freudian slip. First published in 1901 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's a collection of essays that was probably better-known and more widely read in Freud's lifetime than any of his other works. 

    In my favorite local used bookstore, a shelf elf placed a copy of an elderly Macmillan edition, with A.A.Brill's translation, in my line of sight. The paper label on the spine had rubbed nearly away, like the label on a well-soaked bottle of wine, so I had to pull the book off the shelf to see what was facing me, which begins to sound like a Freudian joke in itself.

    The merits of Freud's study of slips of the tongue and memory lapses are threefold. First, he assigns meaning to incidents that many of us tend to overlook. Forgetting the name of a town where you once stayed, or giving the wrong name to someone you know perfectly well, isn't simply a memory lapse or passing confusion; it speaks of something in you and your life situation which merits close attention, because you can learn from it. Second, Freud does dreamwork with these incidents, applying the same principles of analysis to episodes in waking life as he applies to dream symbols. Third, his prime lab rat, first and last, is himself. Like Jung (and unlike lesser scientific minds that fail to realize that knowledge is state-specific) he knows that understanding begins with self-knowledge, and that the most important data on inner events (and their interplay with outer events) must be gathered from first-hand experience.

    We follow Freud down some interesting trails as he studies such phenomena as forgetting names and otherwise well-known phrases and word substitution. He recounts a chance encounter with a fellow-traveler on a train who begins to quote the famous line, in Latin, in which Queen Dido of Carthage issues a terrible curse against Aeneas, the hero who loved her and left her. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625). "Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger."
    In the days where a good education still required Latin, Freud's educated companion would be expected to get the quotation right. But he cannot recollect the harmless indefinite pronoun aliquis. By the end of a long conversation in which Freud guides his travel companion through the free association process he also applies to patients' dreams, they understand that there may be deep significance to the suppression of a seemingly harmless pronoun. In aliquis the speaker now recognizes the echo of "liquid" and "liquefaction" in the Latin word. This reminds him that he's alarmed that his girlfriend may have missed her period. He's scared that he is the "someone" who will be cursed if he abandons his girl and a baby he doesn't want.

    Freud called errors in speech or memory Fehlleistungen, which means "faulty actions" or "misperformances." His English translator dubbed these phenomena "parapraxes" (nborrowing from Greek words for "another" and "action") - a term used in psychology - and "symptomatic misperformances'.  Freud maintained that word-amnesia and name substitution are related to "disturbing complexes" that prompt the psyche to seek to repress memories and information that may cause us pain. We hear of a man who simply cannot remember the name of a business partner who stole his girlfriend and married her; he just doesn't want to know. Freud can't remember the name of a town he knows well (Nervi) when treating a neurotic at a time when he himself is feeling nervous and may be heading for a migraine.

    While Freud's theory of repression may apply to some of his examples, there's both more and less going on with our slips and memory lapses than he allows for. Common sense tells us that memory gaps can be the result of all sorts of life factors, from fatigue to drug or alcohol abuse to migraine to information overload. Einstein once made people laugh because, asked for his phone number, he had to look it up in the book. He declared that he had so much on his mind that he didn't need to burden it by adding the need to remember things he could easily look up.

    I am generally pretty good with names, so when I call someone I know by a name that isn't their own I pay attention to what may be showing through my slip, In one of my workshops, I kept calling a man "Michael" though I was perfectly well aware that his name was "Don." Finally I asked, "Who's Michael?" Through tears, he explained that Michael had been his partner for many years; Michael had died but Don felt him close and was actually wearing his sweater that day.

     One of my rules for life navigation is: Notice what's showing through your slip. To which I will now add: And don't tag it a Freudian slip until you've explored what else may be going on. 

When Jung and Ancient Egypt Made Freud Swoon

The psychic field between Freud and Jung was always highly charged, producing both paranormal and all-too-human phenomena. It was never more charged, perhaps than when Egyptian elements were also at play. Here is the story of how Freud fainted twice in public during conversations with Jung that involved Egyptian themes - mummification and the psychology of Akhenaten.

Bremen, August, 1909 

The young Jung takes Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, who will sail with them to New York, to visit Bremen cathedral. The lead cellar and crypt are a grisly chamber of curiosities. Centuries earlier, a workman fell from the roof and when his body was discovered years later in the cellar, it had been preserved like a mummy. Corpses of birds were in the same condition. It became a strange fashion for wealthy burghers of Bremen to have themselves buried in the lead cellar, wishing for the same effect.
     After inspecting the mummies of Bremen, the three psychologists lunch at one of the best restaurants in the city. Jung compares the Bremen mummies to the bodies found in peat bogs in northern Europe that were similarly preserved. Wine flows. Freud becomes noticeably tetchy. Finally he yells at Jung, repeatedly, "Why do you keep talking about these corpses?" Then he faints at the table. Jung picks him up and carries him to another room.
      Freud later told Jung that "all this chatter about corpses" meant that Jung harbored "death wishes" towards him. The incident is still very curious indeed, since Freud was generally an enthusiast for mummies. He took pains to acquire painted Egyptian mummy bandages and mummy cases for his immense private collection of ancient sacred art, much of which came (via dealers and patrons) from tomb robbers.

Munich, November 1912. 

Freud and Jung are at a conference. Tension between them has been running high. Freud resents the younger man's entry into the field of the psychology of religion, where he would like to reign supreme. Jung has been less and less inclined to yield authority to Freud as the father figure he formerly declared him to be. He is steadily chipping away at Freud's most important theories.
    They leave the conference crowd to take a long walk. Maybe their relationship can be repaired. It started out with such a deep sense of affinity that on their first meeting, they talked for thirteen hours. Until recently, Freud regarded Jung as his heir and successor. During the walk, Jung apologizes to Freud for various "mistakes" that hurt his mentor's feelings. They go in to lunch apparently reconciled.      
      The conferees discuss a paper by Karl Abraham on Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to abolish the worship of the many gods of Egypt in favor of a single, abstract God represented by the Aten, or sun disk. Abraham's argument, very much in line with Freud's way of thinking, proposed that it was Akhenaten's "father complex" that gave rise to his monotheism. He founded a religion in order to bring down his father, the luxury-loving polytheist Amenophis III. He took pleasure in effacing the images of the god Amon from inscriptions because this was part of his father's name. 
    This approach profoundly dissatisfied Jung, who had recently written in Symbols of Transformation that Akhenaten was "a profoundly religious person whose acts could not be explained by personal resistance to his father." Freud is deeply disturbed by the gathering debate about a pharaoh and the origins of religion. Suddenly he swoons at the table, in front of all the analysts. Once again, Jung catches him up in his arms and carries him to a private space to recover.
    Perhaps there was an element of presentiment in Freud's swoon at the Munich conference. His last major work, the brilliant but deeply flawed Moses and Monotheism, was an attempt to attribute the rise of monotheism to Akhenaten, and analyze the founder. This book caused him immense frustration and self-doubt and he took to referring to it as his "historical novel."
    Both Freud and Jung knew that fainting can be a defensive mechanism. Though I do not know of any record of Jung swooning in front of others as a man, he did this as a boy in order to get out of going to school in a period when he was being bullied.
    Freud's fainting acts bring into clear focus the tremendous energy generated between the aging master and the increasingly reluctant acolyte. The emotional and psychic field between them was always highly charged. This came to a head in a different way on the night when they were discussing the occult in Freud's study. Freud kept rejecting Jung's examples of paranormal phenomena, indicating that he regarded them as mere "spookery". Jung tried to withhold an angry response. As he held himself in, he felt odd sensations in his body, "as if my diaphragm were made of iron and becoming red hot". The next moment, there was the sound of a loud crash from Freud's bookcase. Freud jumped up to examine it. Jung told him to wait a moment, there would be a second crash. And there was.
    Jung suggested that the crashes were the work of a poltergeist. Freud suspected that Jung may have tried to conjure such a force to prove his theories of the occult. After Jung left, he tried to summon the poltergeist himself, without success. 

It is hard to overstate the importance of the Egyptian current in the fainting spells, especially when conscious that Egyptian images were dominant in Freud's vast collection of "ancient and grubby gods" (as he once called them). He kept a bronze head of Osiris on his desk, and rubbed it from time to time. He told H.D. that he called it the Answerer, because it gave him answers, even lacking the jeweled eyes that tomb robbers had removed from the sockets.

Image: Akhenaten, the "heretic pharaoh" Freud depicted in his book Moses and Monotheism as the founder of monotheism.

We'll learn from Jung in my new online training The Dreamer's School of Soul. Then in December at magical Mosswood Hollow we'll spend a whole weekend "Dreaming with Jung."

Heard by fairies, followed by Freud, transported to Van Diemen's Land

Mosswood Hollow is my favorite place to lead retreats in North America. Think a cross between Hogwarts and Wind in the Willows. I knew the name was propitious when a friend first brought me here ten years ago. Before that, the owners had never heard of me, nor I of them. Yet my surname is in the name they invented for their retreat center, inspired by the mossy woods all around us, in the foothills of the Cascade mountains of Washington State.
    I have been at Mosswood for two weeks, leading trainings. I am not surprised that i have new evidence that (as the Chinese say) "there are things that like to happen together", though I was amazed with delight by the incidents I will now report:

1. Fairy dust gets around

We had fairy voices in my Level One training for teachers of Active Dreaming at Mosswood last week. They included the achingly beautiful voice of inspired singer-songwriter Kai Altair. During our graduation ceremony on Friday, she sang "The Calling", a song of the heart's yearning that stirred every heart in our circle. Later she gave us a song that was born in a workshop I led on "Making Death Your Ally". Both songs are on her marvelous dream-charged album Dreamwalker.
    Faerie magic continued into Friday evening, when we gathered round a fire in the field between the lodge and the beaver pond. Joined by two other wonderful singers, a flute player and drummers, Kai sang again, improvising, riffing, playing with the spirits of the land and with visitors from the world-behind-the-world.
    When I went up to the porch, I found the owner of the lodge relaxing with a glass of wine and the glow of Faerie fire. I remarked, "We don't need a conference on fairies with so much fairy magic going on in my programs."
    He told me there is actually a conference on fairies that meets in Washington State, not at Mosswood Hollow but at another wildly beautiful location. He named some of our mutual friends, including prominent Celtic scholars, who have been presenters there.
    When I opened my email in the morning, I was amazed and delighted to find an invitation to lead keynote workshops at the 18th Congress on Human and Fairy Relations in June 2016. The invitation was charming, and since it came over the transom edged with Fairie fire, it did not take me long to clarify the details and say Yes.


2. Freud is following me

At the breakfast table yesterday, I share a brief report of a dream in which I am teaching a group to recognize the signs that gods and fairies are at play among humans. The discussion that follows leads me to recall that Sigmund Freud amassed a huge collection of statuettes of gods from the ancient world. He hated to be separated and seemed to commune with them. He jokingly referred to them as his "old and grubby gods". I was able to view 2,000 (of the original 3,000) when I visited Freud's last home in London. Later, while leading a writing retreat here at Mosswood Hollow, I wrote 4,000 words of a story about Freud's relationship with his gods, which were regarded by their makers as living vessels for the powers that had been called into their forms.
    Dreams require action. I announced that my action plan, after discussion of my dream, would be to pull out my Freud story, edit it, and see if it wants to become part of a new book.
    When I opened my laptop upstairs, I saw a message that read:

Sigmund Freud is Following You on Twitter!

     I checked and found that my new follower on Twitter is sigmund freud@freudfreaks, a site that posts daily quotes from Freud. I rushed downstairs to tell my group that Sigmund Freud is now following me. "It's about time," I quipped.
     I stepped out onto the porch to spread the word to dreamers sipping coffee in the morning sun. When I opened the door, the first phrase I heard - from a man sharing his own dream at an outdoor table was "an erect penis."
     I am not sure whether this is confirmation that Freud is following me, or Freud's revenge.

3. The she-oak lizard of Van Diemen's Land

One of the great delights of the residential retreats I lead at Mosswood Hollow is the chance to sit out on the porch under the stars in the evening and share stories, poems and songs.
    Yesterday evening, we were graced by the flute playing of a Huron/Wendat dreamer who has come to me - as she announced - t learn how to bring back the dreamways of her ancestors. Were thrilled by the soaring voice of a singer who once formed a band called The Sidhe. Then an Irishman in the group was persuaded to give us a favorite Irish ballad from another time, "The Black Velvet Band", in which a Belfast man laments that he was deceived by a lovely woman and transported as a convict to Van Diemen's Land, known today as Tasmania.
    I sat down today to write this note on synchronicity, with the tickling feeling that the two cases above needed to be  joined by a third, since three times makes the charm and is also in the title of my book The Three "Only" Things, which explains how we may notice a hidden hand in the play of synchronicity, which thins the veils between the worlds as forces of the deeper world probe and push through the curtains of our consensual hallucinations about reality.
    I paused to check email, and found this message from a man in northern England who was previously unknown to me:

"I dreamed last night I was standing in a shallow part of the sea. Out of a small hole in the shale on the sea floor, a very long black lizard popped its head out and swam towards a group of others. When I woke up I thought this was just some strange dream creature, but then decided to Goggle it, and came across an image that was very similar, which described the animal as a She-oak skink (Cyclodomorphus casuarinae) which is found only in Tasmania.
     "A few hours later, while having lunch, I looked for a book to read and my eyes fell on Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss on my bookshelf, which a friend lent me a couple of years ago, and which I must confess I’d never previously got round to reading. Just four pages in, my jaw dropped a little when I read; 'They were as real as the thrilling walk I once took through the Queensland bush, under a sunshower, when I heard the she-oaks sing.'
     "I had to drop you a line about this because I’d never seen any type of long lizard before this dream, and didn’t even know such things existed. I’ll have to wait and see now if there is a deeper meaning to this synchronicity!"

Fairy wings are beating, and playful spirits work are in the wires, and the wireless.

Coming soon: Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity inEveryday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Pub date: October 3. Available now for pre-order.

Chagrin: Freud's final reading

He always loved to read, and is steeped in literature, philosophy and archaeology. Now this last joy is to be taken from him.

    He has lost the city that was his home for 78 years, his clients, his power to write, even the love of his dog, who recoils from the stink of the rotting bone in his face. It is agony for him to eat and hard for him to speak. Even to smoke another of his beloved cigars - the source of the oral cancer that is killing him, but also his solace and (he has always insisted) the companions of his thought process - he sometimes has to hold his jaws open with a clothespeg. His devoted daughter helps him from time to time to remove the "monster", the huge metal prosthesis that has replaced a great chunk of his jaw and palate on the right side; it can take thirty minutes to re-insert it. They have found yet another malignant tumor inside his face and it is eating a hole through the flesh. It's too close to the eye and the brain for further surgery.

   In the world beyond the house in London where he knows he has come to die, a nightmare has spilled out of the darkest basements of the collective psyche and threatens to consume the world. For decades he has worked to diagnose the human craving for authority. He saw the logic of a Hitler arising as an externalized superego, and even described the phenomenon as "inevitable" given the condition of men's self-understanding. Nonetheless, he was stunned by the fierce joy with which his fellow-Austrians fell at the feet of the man-beast with the funny moustache who removes the agony of choice from all who will obey him, while licensing their blackest instincts.

    Around him in London, the English he so greatly admires are jittery as they pass out gas masks and dig trenches in the parks, talking of how Hitler's bombers will turn the world's greatest city into a mega-Guernica. And he is losing the strength and the vision even to keep turning the pages of a book. He chooses, as the last book he will ever read, La peau de chagrin, the novel that made Balzac famous. The title has been translated as "The Magic Skin" or "The Wild Ass's Skin." It has a double meaning in French that escapes these clumsy translations. Chagrin (as in English) means sorrow or disappointment, often resulting from failure; it also means the rough, untanned hide from the rump of a horse or wild ass once often used for binding books. In English, this kind of leather is called "shagreen".

    Anyway, the hero of Balzac's tale - a character named Raphael - is a penurious scribbler who has decided to kill himself after losing his last money, when he stumbles into a curiosity shop that seems to contain the emblems of a whole world, like a kind of 3-dimensional Tarot deck. The owner shows Raphael a piece of shagreen with magic properties. The young writer can have this for nothing and the skin - covered with indistinct Eastern spells - will grant his every wish. But he would be well-advised not to use it.

    The skeptical writer decides to give it a try. What does he have to lose? He's already bent on death. He rubs the skin and wishes for a revel worthy of a dissolute king. Instantly we are transported by Balzac's muscular prose into a scene of wild orgy and banqueting. The catch (and there has to be a catch in wishcraft involving lower powers) is that every time Raphael makes a wish, the skin shrinks and when it does so, he loses some of his own life-force. Eventually, having wished himself wealth and fame, he is desperately using his money to try to obtain a medical treatment that will reverse the process that is turning him into a shrunken, grotesque little old man.
    He tries to stop wishing for everything, ordering his servants to provide him with everything he thinks he could desire at appointed times. The plan is overthrown in a scene with a beautiful woman for whom he feels passionate love. She flees from him, bent on killing herself to stop him destroying himself by wishing for her. Exactly the opposite is accomplishes. As Raphael pursues her and flings himself on her, the last scrap of shagreen vanishes and he dies.

    The summary brings out the fantastical elements in Balzac's story, but anyone who has read Balzac will know that its great success lies in what was more fantastic than fantasy in all his writing: his power of vividly realistic description. The reader is spared no detail of Raphael's decline into an ugly, shriveled wreck. 
    It is impossible not to be moved by the picture of Freud, himself now a shriveled invalid, following this page by page. When he finished, he told his doctor, Max Schur, that it was the right book for him, because it was about "shrinkage and starvation", his lot. That same day, he gave his doctor the nod to give him huge doses of morphine that hastened his death. This non-religious Jew whose last work, Moses and Monotheism, boasted that it wss going to deprive the Jews of their defining hero (and this at a moment when the swastikas shadowed all of Europe) died on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in 1939.

    He wanted to "die in harness, like King Macbeth", and very nearly succeeded. I respect his stoicism and absolute dedication to his life's work. I am also curious to know whether, looking back from the Other Side, Freud has experienced chagrin for his persistent denial, through his long career, of the reality of spirit and its survival of physical death. And whether he has made up with Jung now that certain essential things are much clearer.

Source: I have drawn some of my facts from an excellent recent study of Freud's last years by Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007)

Statue of Freud in front of the Tavistock Clinic, near his last home in London. Photo by Mike Peel