Dream Story
A marriage shaken by what each of them confesses to having wanted. Freud told Schnitzler he had got there on his own.
Over two nights in carnival-season Vienna, Fridolin, a young doctor, and his wife Albertine begin telling each other about attractions they had kept quiet, hers to an officer at a seaside resort, his to a girl on a beach. Unsettled, Fridolin drifts through the dark city into a masked gathering where he does not belong, and a stranger there pays for his intrusion. He comes back to a wife whose dream has run further into the night than his own waking hours.
Schnitzler holds the couple's fantasies and their marriage in one frame, giving a jealous imagining the weight of an act and letting a dream accuse as sharply as a confession. For a clinician the pull is in how thin the membrane is between the wish and the deed, and how an avowal of desire can wound and bind. Freud wrote that Schnitzler had reached through intuition what analysis reached through labour, and treated him as a double. Stanley Kubrick filmed it as Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
About the author
Arthur Schnitzler
Arthur Schnitzler (1862 to 1931) was an Austrian dramatist and novelist who trained as a physician in Vienna and practised medicine alongside his writing. His plays and prose, among them the novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle) and the cycle Reigen, examine desire, self-deception, and the inner lives of turn-of-the-century Viennese characters. Sigmund Freud, in a 1922 letter, described him as a kind of double, recognising a writer who had reached by intuition much of what psychoanalysis approached by study.
Details
- 1926
- German
- 128
- 9780141182247