ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud considers briefly and rejects the hypothesis that the thought expressed what he describes as the "uninteresting commonplace" that seeing something is different from hearing or reading about it. He finds evidence of a more plausible interpretation in the odd depression regarding the trip that he and his brother experienced in Trieste, before they purchased tickets to Athens. He takes as self-evident that the kind of incredulity attempts to repudiate a piece of reality. Freud hypothesizes both his depression in Trieste and his thought on the Acropolis attempted to repudiate his long-standing desire to travel and to see the world. The derealization that he believes he experienced on the Acropolis, Freud suggests, repudiated his fulfillment of his long-standing wish to travel and to see such places as Athens. The essence of success, Freud speculates, may consist in one's sense of having gotten further than one's father, coupled with the feeling that to exceed one's father is forbidden.
