Character Analysis
In his preface to the second German-language edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote: "For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally—a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life" (source).
One scholar suggests that Freud's work on the book helped him to acknowledge and deal with the underlying hostility he felt toward his father, Jakob Freud (source). Freud even admitted in a letter to his good friend Wilhelm Fliess that his self-analysis had revealed to him his own Oedipal love for his mother and jealousy toward his father (source).
This revelation flickers in the background of many of the personal dreams that Freud recounts and analyzes throughout The Interpretation of Dreams. To get a sense of how Freud's hostility toward his father sometimes took shape, take a gander at this passage from Freud's Dream of Count Thun:
Once more I was in front of the station, but this time in the company of an elderly gentleman. […] He appeared to be blind, at all events with one eye, and I handed him a male glass urinal (which we had to buy or had bought in town). So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was blind. (5.3.38)
In his detailed interpretation of this dream, Freud retells a story from his childhood in which he ticked off his father by using a chamber pot in his parents' bedroom while they were present. Naughty Sigmund. His father had said "The boy will come to nothing," and young Sigmund felt this to be a "frightful blow to [his] ambition" (5.3.45).
For that reason, says Freud, his Dream of Count Thun reversed his and his father's roles. Jakob Freud is put in an embarrassing, prone position as he is forced to urinate in front of his son—in fact, with his son's assistance. Freud also notes that the dream's reference to his father's glaucoma (he appears to be partially blind) was a subtle reference to Freud's own contribution to the discovery that cocaine could be used as an anesthetic for eye surgeries.
As Freud says: "I was making fun of him; I had to hand him the urinal because he was blind, and I reveled in allusions to my discoveries in connection with the theory of hysteria, of which I felt so proud" (5.3.45).
Although The Interpretation of Dreams reveals very little about Jakob Freud as he was in real life, the book shows us how he appeared to his son—and how he continued to appear in his son's dreams in many conflicted and ambivalent ways. Sometimes he's a figure of authority, sometimes he's an example of weakness, and sometimes he's a target for Freud's own hostility and anxious desire to prove himself.