ABSTRACT
Freud’s motto for The Interpretation of Dreams is from Vergil’s Aeneid: ‘Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo’ (‘If can’t bend the higher powers, I’ll raise hell’). He insisted that it simply referred to the mechanism of repression, adding that he’d borrowed it from Ferdinand Lassalle, the Prussian socialist. But Freud was well-versed in the classics, notably the Aeneid, and this epigraph has rich personal, political, and cultural associations. In Vergil, it follows Aeneas’s katabasis and is spoken by Juno, who in turn summons Allecto, a gorgon-headed fury, to persecute Aeneas. This invocation of feminine (and chthonic) powers is repeated by Freud towards the close of his dream book, where it immediately precedes his famous statement: ‘The interpretation of dreams is the Via Regia to knowledge of the unconscious in the inner life’. This paper explores core katabatic metaphors in Freud’s dream book, including underworld rivers, royal roads, Furies, Titans, Tartarus, Odysseus’s nekyia, and psychoanalysis as ‘labour in the depths’. Metaphors of easy descent (‘facilis descensus Averno’) and tangled paths (the mycelium of dream-wishes) shape ways of thinking about analytic practice. I also argue that Freud’s distinctive use of metaphor holds polarities in creative tension, notably that of conquistador versus outsider, and is both constitutive and subversive of his theory-building.
