"One of my acquaintances, Mr. M——­, has been attacked by no less a person than Goethe in an essay with, we all maintain, unwarrantable violence.  Mr. M——­ has naturally been ruined by this attack.  He complains very bitterly of this at a dinner-party, but his respect for Goethe has not diminished through this personal experience.  I now attempt to clear up the chronological relations which strike me as improbable.  Goethe died in 1832.  As his attack upon Mr. M——­ must, of course, have taken place before, Mr. M——­ must have been then a very young man.  It seems to me plausible that he was eighteen.  I am not certain, however, what year we are actually in, and the whole calculation falls into obscurity.  The attack was, moreover, contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature.’"

The absurdity of the dream becomes the more glaring when I state that Mr. M——­ is a young business man without any poetical or literary interests.  My analysis of the dream will show what method there is in this madness.  The dream has derived its material from three sources: 

1.  Mr. M——­, to whom I was introduced at a dinner-party, begged me one day to examine his elder brother, who showed signs of mental trouble.  In conversation with the patient, an unpleasant episode occurred.  Without the slightest occasion he disclosed one of his brother’s youthful escapades.  I had asked the patient the year of his birth (year of death in dream), and led him to various calculations which might show up his want of memory.

2.  A medical journal which displayed my name among others on the cover had published a ruinous review of a book by my friend F——­ of Berlin, from the pen of a very juvenile reviewer.  I communicated with the editor, who, indeed, expressed his regret, but would not promise any redress.  Thereupon I broke off my connection with the paper; in my letter of resignation I expressed the hope that our personal relations would not suffer from this.  Here is the real source of the dream.  The derogatory reception of my friend’s work had made a deep impression upon me.  In my judgment, it contained a fundamental biological discovery which only now, several years later, commences to find favor among the professors.

3.  A little while before, a patient gave me the medical history of her brother, who, exclaiming “Nature, Nature!” had gone out of his mind.  The doctors considered that the exclamation arose from a study of Goethe’s beautiful essay, and indicated that the patient had been overworking.  I expressed the opinion that it seemed more plausible to me that the exclamation “Nature!” was to be taken in that sexual meaning known also to the less educated in our country.  It seemed to me that this view had something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards mutilated his genital organs.  The patient was eighteen years old when the attack occurred.