Freud's Worst Nightmare: Dining with Dr. Hannibal Lecter

Abstract

Castration, sexual abuse, hysteria, perversity, excrement, bestiality, animal phobias – Freud's case histories read like horror movies. They are alive with fears – fear of being bitten by a horse, fear of wolves, fear of having one's bowels gnawed by a rat. His famous Interpretation of Dreams is permeated with anxieties and phobias of a similarly horrific nature – nightmares of falling, suffocation, ghosts, dead children, burning skin, urine and feces, people with bird's heads, snakes, men with hatchets, decapitations. In Freud's view, nightmares were the result of wish fulfillments from the unconscious, deadly dreamscapes of sexual origin in which he included murder and cannibalism (Freud 1975: 723–39). Samuel Goldwyn once offered Freud a lucrative contract to write a script for a movie about great lovers of history. Goldwyn could see how the screenwriter might benefit from an understanding of Freud's theories: “How much more forceful will be their creations if they know how to express genuine emotional motivation and suppressed desires” (Gay: 454). Freud refused outright. Goldwyn might have had more success if he had suggested a horror story. Much of Freud's writings, in fact, contain the elements one might expect, not from the pen of a respectable, middle class doctor from fin de siècle Vienna, but from the laptop of contemporary masters of horror such as Stephen King or Thomas Harris. Freud's worst nightmare? How to select one dream of untold terror from such a macabre collection?

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