Character Analysis
Freud spends less time dwelling on his relationship with his mother, Amalia Freud, than he does on his relationship with his father, Jakob Freud. All the same, Amalia does appear in some of Freud's dreams, and although these psychical manifestations may not tell us much about the woman herself, they tell us a lot about her son's perception of her.
One of the most striking dreams in which Amalia Freud appears is Freud's Dumpling Dream (5.3.29). It begins like this:
I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them was the hostess of the inn and was twisting something about in her hand, as though she was making Knödel. She answered that I must wait till she was ready. (These were not definite spoken words.) I felt impatient and went off with a sense of injury. I put on an overcoat. (5.3.29)
As Freud interprets this dream, he notes that the three women in the kitchen remind him of the Three Fates—legendary figures in Greek mythology who determine the length and course of human lives. Freud says: "I knew that one of the three women—the inn-hostess in the dream—was the mother who gives life, and furthermore (as in my own case) gives the living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman's breast" (5.3.30).
Freud also notes that the woman who was rubbing her hands together "as though she was making dumplings" emerged from a childhood memory in which his mother rubbed her hands together to show him that human beings are "made of earth" (5.3.30).
As he continues to interpret the dream, Freud names a number of other associations related to mothers, to love, and to the destinies of human beings. And so, in the end, readers are encouraged to see the connections that Freud's dream draws between memories of his real-life mother Amalia and fantasies of mythical mother-figures like the Three Fates.
As with the other characters who appear in Freud's dreams, the actions of dream-Amalia tell us very little about the woman herself. What we see instead is the impact that her presence made on her son's unconscious mind.