FREUD ON HOLIDAY (VOLUME ONE)
FREUD DREAMS OF ROMA - SHARON KIVLAND

In a paper drafted in 1948, Anna Freud writes that she dreams her father is wandering about while she is doing other things. She feels an inner restlessness, a feeling that she should stop what she is doing and go walking with him. Eventually he calls her to him and demands it himself. Her thoughts, however, are troubled: he should not call her, it is as if a renunciation or a form of progress has been undone because she has been called... in the dream the feeling is very strong that he is wandering around and lost. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess concerning the interpretation of dreams, Sigmund Freud writes: "The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees), hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader - my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes- and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you want to go now?" Freud writes this on 6th August 1899. He is, of course, referring to his own interpretation of dreams, his dream book. He has sent his chapters to Fliess for his opinion, but nothing has yet been set in type. He has added a number of new dreams, but nothing that is really intimate, "personally sexual". And he is feeling rather pleased with his work. The weather is fine and each morning he takes a walk as he also does in the evening. He is very sedentary, but he does not miss his constitutional exercise. My article follows the model of an imaginary walk. There are a number of detours. It also follows the structure of dream or a dream. There are impasses. There are points at which I turn back, discouraged, tired, or inhibited, as I remember Freud writes in 1927, in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, that analysis shows when certain activities like writing and walking are subjected to neurotic inhibition, it is because parts of the body -fingers or legs- are too strongly eroticised. He goes on to remark that as soon as writing (liquid flowing out of tube onto paper), assumes the significance of copulation, or walking becomes a symbol of "treading upon the body of mother earth", both activities stop. They cannot continue because they represent a forbidden sexual act and the ego must either renounce them or undertake new measures of repression. As you can imagine, this has given me tremendous difficulties in completing this paper, and made my usual device of a brisk walk when the writing fails equally vexed. I have been obliged in consequence to adopt the seemingly aimless trajectory of a rambler. [...] (From the publisher)