How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I once acted in the scene between Brutus and Caesar from Schiller before an audience of children. I was fourteen years old at the time and was acting with a nephew who was a year my senior. He had come to us on a visit from England; and he, too, was a revenant, for it was the playmate of my earliest years who had returned in him. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable. We had loved each other and fought with each other; and this childhood relationship, as I have already hinted above, had a determining influence on all my subsequent relations with contemporaries. (6.7.55)
Having realized that he has unconsciously represented himself as Shakespeare's Brutus in his Non Vixit Dream, Freud realizes that the "P." who appears in the dream is not only his junior colleague Joseph Paneth, but also a representation of a beloved childhood playmate—his nephew John.
Quote #8
I have already shown how my warm friendships as well as my enmities with contemporaries went back to my relations in childhood with a nephew who was a year my senior; how he was my superior, how I early learned to defend myself against him, how we were inseparable friends, and how, according to the testimony of our elders, we sometimes fought with each other […]. All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who "früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeight": they have been revenants. (6.9.50)
As editor James Strachey notes, the passage in German that Freud quotes here is from the Dedication to Goethe's Faust (source). If we weave Strachey's translation into Freud's sentence, we get this: "All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who 'long since appeared before my troubled gaze'" (source). What do you make of that, Shmoopers? Is Freud suggesting that the lifelong repetition of this pattern is a good thing or a bad thing?
Quote #9
In another stratum of my thoughts, during the ceremonial unveiling of the memorial, I had reflected thus: "What a number of valued friends I have lost, some through death, some through a breach of our friendship! How fortunate that I have found a substitute for them and that I have gained one who means more to me than ever the others could, and that, at a time of life when new friendships cannot easily be formed, I shall never lose his!" (6.9.55)
Unfortunately, Freud did lose the friendship of Wilhelm Fliess, the man he is alluding to here. As the editors of the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Interpretation of Dreams explain, by 1902, just a few years after the first edition of the book was published, Freud and Fliess's once intense friendship had "cooled" (source).