ABSTRACT
"Every dream has at least one point at which it is unfathomable; a central point, as it were, connecting it with the unknown." With this epigraph, James Mellow begins his award-winning biography, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. In the tension between Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne dramatises the potential for worldly knowledge to adulterate the spirit. One might remembers here Dimmesdale's other, if minor, ailment: "his thoughts had ceased to gush" in his preparation of his Election Sermon. In Anna Freud's comment about the unfathomable place in every dream, the German word translated as the "central point" is nabel, the navel, the mark of the former bodily union between infant and mother. Hawthorne's capacity for identification, for sympathetic knowledge, must have come about through early, intimate, wordless connection with his mother. Hawthorne's insight into hysterical trouble long preceded Freud's, and, clearly, the maladies and the psychology of his day were sources of this knowledge.
