ABSTRACT
Freud’s refusal to indulge the historian’s curiosity, coupled with his repeated assertion that he had gone farther than most in self-disclosure, suggests that, on the occasions when he found it convenient to expose aspects of his inner life, his sincerity did not serve a confessional purpose, let alone a weakness for exhibition. Vienna’s social and political conditions undeniably depressed Freud’s professional perspectives, evoking guilt feelings at not having fulfilled the oedipal task of avenging his father’s humiliation by an anti-Semite, “a Christian,” in Freud’s blunt description. Freud’s reticence about the protagonist of Life is a Dream is all the stranger in that there is good reason to suspect an identification. The clue to Freud’s allusion to a private meaning of the aria lies in that part of the analysis where he relates Count Thun’s disparaging of Germans to a flower, and this brings to his mind two couplets, one in German, the other in Spanish.
