Abstract
This chapter argues that many of the dreams that Sigmund Freud analyzes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and On Dreams (1901) not only link monetary value and feeling, but also take as their mise en scènes social spaces and events such as parties, dinners, visits to the theatre, and so on. In doing so, the affective dimensions of social encounters, many of which are concerned with a class affiliation inscribed by wealth and so much a part of the “chronic impecuniosity” of Shaw’s early years in London, return as motifs in dream narratives, adding performative dimension to definitions of a “material” psychology. The chapter then turns to Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900) to explore the larger sociological ramifications of money, value, and the emotional life of modern subjects.
“Company at table or table d’hôte … spinach was being eaten … Frau E.L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand unresponsively. She then said: ‘But you’ve always had such beautiful eyes.’ … I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles….” (SE 5: 636–37)
—Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (1901)
“A psychological process by which … indifferent experiences take the place of psychically significant ones, cannot fail to arouse suspicion or bewilderment…. What takes place would seem to be something in the nature of a ‘displacement’—of psychical emphasis, shall we say?—by means of intermediate links…. Displacements of this kind are no surprise to us where it is a question of dealing with quantities of affect or with motor activities in general.” (SE 4: 176–77)
—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
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Notes
- 1.
When Freud returned to the topic of dreaming later in his career, he frequently deployed a similar rhetorical strategy of refuting prevalent misconceptions about dreams, their origins, and their relationships to other phenomena. Such is the case, for example, in his 1922 paper “Dreams and Telepathy” delivered to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. All quotations from Freud’s works come from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-analysis, 1953). Quoted excerpts will be followed by volume and page numbers in the text.
- 2.
Cannon Schmitt, “Interpret or Describe?” Representations 135 (Summer 2016): 104. This article appears in a special issue of the journal on “Description across the Disciplines” and contains a valuable meta-narrative on reading methodology. One of Schmitt’s juxtapositions of narration with description hints at the point I am attempting to make about the ways in which dream narratives as interpreted by Freud match the semiotically rich quality of narration as theorized by Georg Lukács, the subject of Schmitt’s argument: “Animated living narration; static, dead description: that of the ‘fat and the living’ to ‘the thin and the dead’” (104).
- 3.
Freud continued to insist on this level of attentiveness and expansive sense of inquiry in exploring the thoughts underlying dream contents. In Lecture VII on “The Manifest Content of Dreams and the Latent Dream-Thoughts” in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, for example, he is adamant that the dreamer “must not hold back any idea from us,” which includes not only seemingly unimportant details, but also “disagreeable” truths that a patient might be reluctant to report (SE 15: 115).
- 4.
Freud identifies the overdetermined nature of both images and affects often in The Interpretation of Dreams. In reflecting upon the significance of “trimethylamine” in the so-called “Dream of Irma’s Injection,” for instance, he recognizes that “so many important subjects converged upon that one word” (SE 4: 117); and, in his chapter “Affect in Dreams,” Freud concludes that “it appears that affects in dreams are fed from a confluence of several sources and are over-determined in their reference to the material of the dream-thoughts” (SE 5: 480). Freud adduces examples of composite pictures in several chapters, some of the most useful occurring in “The Work of Condensation” (SE 4: 292–93) and later (SE 4: 320–22).
- 5.
See “The Relation of Dreams to Waking Life” (SE 4: 7–10), where Freud refutes an earlier generation of commentators who regarded dreamers as “removed” from the “world of waking consciousness” (7).
- 6.
It is hardly accidental that “fungible” originates in the Latin fungi, to perform. Substitution in exchange is a kind of performance of equivalences, Crofts’ “hard money” in Mrs. Warren’s Profession for whatever he values, for example.
- 7.
Biographers routinely describe Shaw’s difficult early years in London. Hesketh Pearson, for example, depicts his “indescribable seediness” in the later 1870s and early 1880s. This abject poverty was accompanied by his anxiety about social encounters, an anxiety that motivated both his study of books of etiquette and his membership in The Zetetical Society, a debating club where he could practice his public speaking. See Pearson, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (London: St. James’s Library, 1942), 62–74. Growing up in the Leopoldstadt section of Vienna, a Jewish district, Freud also experienced the results of considerable financial difficulty. Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988) notes that the “majority” of residents “huddled in badly overcrowded, unprepossessing quarters. The Freuds were with that majority” (13). Freud acknowledged that in those days his family lived in “very straitened circumstances” (qtd. in Gay, 25).
- 8.
As I suggested in the acknowledgements to this book, not only do the dates of Shaw’s, Freud’s, and Simmel’s births make them contemporaries, but they also share a kind of ironic kindred as all three reached their middle age near the end of the nineteenth century. Again, Shaw and Freud were born, respectively, in July and May of 1856; Simmel, less than two years later in March of 1858. By the end of the century, all three were well-published writer-intellectuals, although all three—Simmel in particular—were buffeted by criticism and were tormented by feelings of isolation. This topic is discussed later in the chapter.
- 9.
Although he refers to contemporary research in psychology, Nordau, as might be expected given the date of publication of Degeneration, does not draw upon Freud’s work. Instead, many of his comments on psychology, hysteria, and related topics are indebted to the research of such notable figures as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Jean-Martin Charcot, Alfred Binet, and others. See, for example, “Book One” of Dengeneration, English translation (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 1–44. Shaw’s charge that Nordau was seduced by “mock scientific theory” and “sham-science” (MCE 330, 331) is thus not aimed at Freudian psychoanalysis. In Sixteen Self Sketches, however, the elder Shaw makes occasional sorties against psychoanalysis and Freud himself. In Chapter IX, “Who I Am, and What I Think,” reprinted from a “catechism” he wrote years earlier, the elder Shaw provides this parenthetical interpolation: “When I wrote this in 1901, I did not believe that an author so utterly void of delicacy as Sigmund Freud could not only come into human existence, but become as famous and even instructive by his defect as a blind man might by writing essays on painting …” (52).
- 10.
See, for example, Mrs. Tarleton’s advice to her daughter Hypatia in Misalliance. Recalling that she once regarded the aristocracy as a “nasty sneering lot,” Mrs. Tarleton observes that it’s “far worse when theyre civil, because that always means that they want you to lend them money; and you must never do that, Hypatia, because they never pay. How can they? They dont make anything, you see” (CPP 4: 121–22). She also confides that while her snobbish father “looked down” on her industrious husband, he was often forced to borrow money from him, a necessity that invariably “hurt his pride” (CPP 4: 135).
- 11.
Goux, 22.
- 12.
Goux, 30.
- 13.
Freud’s first three sets of lectures were actually delivered at the University of Vienna in October, 1915. In a footnote to Freud’s lecture “Anxiety” in the Introductory Lectures, James Strachey emphasizes that “The problem of anxiety occupied Freud’s mind throughout his life, and his views on it went through a number of changes” (SE 16: 392). This useful note directs readers to several places in the Standard Edition where Freud refines his views of the topic.
- 14.
See Lecture XXV “Anxiety,” SE 16: 397–401. Here Freud defines three forms of neurotic anxiety, proceeding from more or less trivial phobias to anxieties of far greater import and physiological consequence including tremors, heart palpitations, and more.
- 15.
Gray, 122.
- 16.
Gray, 123.
- 17.
Clover, 112. Clover quickly adds that not until “this moment, when value ceased to be, can it be priced” (112).
- 18.
See Interpretation 4: 19 and 4: 44–45.
- 19.
In Freud’s “Bibliography A,” this work is attributed to I. Delbœuf (SE 5: 689).
- 20.
It is worth noting that in discussing kosten, a word that can mean both “cost” or “taste,” Freud specifically mentions the serving of spinach in his dream of the table d’hôte. Earlier, I characterized the allusion to spinach as an aspect of narrative that, while seemingly insignificant, may accrue meaning, and in this instance it does. Freud conjectures that at such a meal a mother might need to cajole her children into tasting the spinach (in part, presumably, because its “cost” is already calculated in the prix fixe and to do otherwise would be to ignore or waste its “value”).
- 21.
See, for example, Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory-Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Carlson cultivates the metaphor of haunting in particular as it relates to memory, finding memorial ghosts cultivated by prior theatre-going endemic to our responses to stage performance.
- 22.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69 (emphasis in original).
- 23.
It is partly for this reason that Ricoeur later challenges the notion that forgetting is a sign of a dysfunctional memory: “… we shun the specter of a memory that would never forget anything. We even consider it to be monstrous.” He wonders aloud if “appropriate memory” might have “something in common with the renunciation of total reflection” (413), an insight pertinent to a patient, like Freud’s discontented young wife, who resists a dream analysis suggesting the low esteem with which she regards her husband.
- 24.
See Goux, 28–29.
- 25.
Shavians are well aware of Shaw’s idiosyncratic method of punctuation, as evidenced in both the epigraph for this section and elsewhere: no apostrophe marks for contractions, for example, and a space between letters (m e) rather than italics or underlining for emphasis. Throughout, Shaw’s practices of punctuation will be retained without an explanatory note.
- 26.
Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love, 178. Peter Gahan also discusses Shaw’s regular “seminars with the leading economists of the day” and his bemused fascination with Wicksteed’s “Jevonian curves” in Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914, 2–6.
- 27.
See Pearson, 68–69.
- 28.
Gray, 123.
- 29.
Gray, 124.
- 30.
William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2nd edition revised and enlarged (London: Macmillan and Company, 1879), 35, 37.
- 31.
Jevons, 46.
- 32.
See, for example, Holroyd, who regards Wicksteed’s key contribution to value theory is his refutation of Marxist economists who “had failed to account for the obvious dependence of prices on supply and demand” (178). As The Common Sense of Political Economy (London: Macmillan and Company, 1910) shows, Wicksteed’s conceptions of value and of marginalist economics more generally is far more nuanced than this brief summary would suggest.
- 33.
Wicksteed, vii.
- 34.
Wicksteed, 19.
- 35.
Wicksteed, 25.
- 36.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), 168. Drive thus might be likened to a machine that is constantly turned on, which Jean LaPlanche implies when asserting that while an object may possess attributes that “trigger the satisfying action,” no object “can satisfy the drive.” See Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 11–13.
- 37.
Wicksteed, 25–27.
- 38.
Wicksteed, 40–41.
- 39.
Through his meetings with Wicksteed and others, Shaw became acquainted with William Stanley Jevons’s theories of money as a medium of exchange, a “common denominator” that can replace the supreme awkwardness and so-called “double coincidence” of a barter economy. In his 1905 preface to The Irrational Knot, Shaw reveals his familiarity with the work of “General Walker”—Francis Amasa Walker (1840–97), American economist and once president of MIT—who also demonstrated a keen familiarity with Jevons’ theories. In the inaugural chapter of his book Money (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1891), Walker reviews Jevons’ several hypotheses about the functioning of money, mildly rebutting the notion that money may serve as a “store of value” used for deferred payments (12). For a succinct discussion of money’s four primary functions and insights into Jevons, see “The Money-Function,” Walker, 1–23.
- 40.
Joseph Bleicher, “Leben,” Theory, Culture and Society 5 (2006): 343; as quoted in Henry Schermer and David Jary, Form and Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology: A New Interpretation (Houndmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 59.
- 41.
David Frisby, “Introduction to the Translation,” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 1.
- 42.
Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 137.
- 43.
Frisby, “Introduction,” 3.
- 44.
Kurt H. Wolff, “Preface,” Georg Simmel, 1858–1918 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1959), ix.
- 45.
In a 1963 lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, Albert Salomon recalls attending Simmel’s lectures at the University of Berlin in 1910, lectures so popular—a fact that apparently disturbed Simmel—they were held in the university’s largest “classroom” (or lecture hall), which seated hundreds. The lectures were scheduled at an unattractive time specifically to keep the attendance to a number the hall could accommodate. See Salomon, “Georg Simmel Reconsidered,” ed. Gary D. Jaworski, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 8.3 (1995): 362–63.
- 46.
See “Selections from Simmel’s Writing for the Journal Jugend,” trans. Thomas B. Kemple, Theory, Culture & Society, 29 (7/8) (2012): 263–78. Simmel’s interest in the theatre, like Shaw’s, extended beyond the artistry of Eleonora Duse, and at the time of his death in 1918 Simmel had drafted a book on the sociology of stage acting which was stolen along with the suitcase in which it was conveyed and never recovered. Henry Schermer and David Jary discuss this incident in Form and Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology, 54.
- 47.
Goodstein, 15.
- 48.
Pearson, 60.
- 49.
In his biography, Gay recalls the encouragement, affection, and financial support Breuer lavished on Freud throughout the 1880s, a closeness that began to change in 1891 and by the end of the decade Freud’s similar affection for Breuer had been shattered. See Gay, 67–69.
- 50.
Schermer and Jary understand this matter slightly differently, citing a letter to Bouglé while writing The Philosophy of Money in which Simmel explains that he was “completely absorbed” by sociology (54). But this is so much small beer in light of their agreement with Goodstein on the “fluidity” of disciplines at the time and the fact that at the University of Berlin Simmel lectured on a wide variety of topics from several disciplines: logic, the philosophical aspects of Darwin’s writing, and others. See Schermer and Jary, 50–56.
- 51.
Goodstein, 7.
- 52.
Simmel’s lectures at Berlin University garnered an international “cosmopolitan” audience that troubled some German academics. Goodstein emphasizes his cosmopolitanism in her introductory chapter, especially 15–20. Also, as is well known, one of the negative valences of the term “cosmopolitan” is its cloaked anti-Semitism. Both Simmel and Freud experienced anti-Semitic hatred, Simmel in particular when seeking appointments as a university professor. As Peter Gay describes, borrowing from Freud’s autobiographical account, Freud suffered anti-Semitic hostility in his early days at the University of Vienna, and in 1883 confronted several fellow passengers hurling ethnic slurs at him in a train car (27–28). Years later long after Simmel’s death in 1918, his sociology was viewed “with suspicion” by the Third Reich, which banned his books during their rule (Goodstein, 143).
In a recent essay on Shaw’s sharp review of Nordau’s Degeneration, I discuss his characterization of Nordau as a “cosmopolitan Jew.” Nevertheless, and paradoxically, Shaw also saw himself as far more cosmopolitan than nationalist. See, for example, “A Note on Aggressive Nationalism,” The New Statesman July 12, 1913, rpt. In The Matter with Ireland, eds. David H. Greene and Dan H. Laurence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 81–84. And in his 1921 “Preface” to Immaturity, Shaw identifies himself as a European cosmopolitan, not an Irishman: “And so I am a tolerably good European in the Nietzschean sense, but a very bad Irishman in the Sinn Fein or Chosen People sense” (xxxviii–xxxix).
- 53.
Albert Salomon discusses anti-Semitism at length in his lecture “Georg Simmel Reconsidered.” He reminds his listeners that Simmel and his parents were baptized as Christians, a common practice among upper- and upper middle class Jews at the time, and that after later leaving the Protestant religion, Simmel never adopted the practices of Judaism. The so-called “Jewish threat” included the charges that Jewish academics sought to corrupt their youthful students and were corrosive of the “academic standards of moral and religious philosophy” (367). See Salomon, 364–68.
- 54.
Goodstein, 140.
- 55.
Goodstein, 149.
- 56.
See Nordau, 34–44, and his protracted assault on Wagner in “The Richard Wagner Cult,” 171–213. The opening chapters of Degeneration treat such topics as mass transportation, the chronic fatigue of the modern city-dweller, the frenzied pace of modern life, and the psychological impact of these developments. Shaw’s take on life in the modern city was somewhat different. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Shaw, Murder, and the Modern Metropolis,” SHAW 32: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Desmond Harding (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 102–16. Ritschel recounts the circumstances of Shaw’s writing the letter “Blood Money to Whitechapel” on September 24, 1888, which connects Jack the Ripper’s assaults with slum housing conditions, thus making the “comfortable classes” complicit in the commission of these savage crimes (107). For the larger context of these atrocities, see Ritschel’s Bernard Shaw, W.T. Stead, and the New Journalism, 9–58.
- 57.
See Austin Harrington and Thomas B. Kemple, “Introduction: Georg Simmel’s ‘Sociological Metaphysics’: Money, Sociality, and Precarious Being,” Theory, Culture & Society 29 (7/8) (2012): 16–20. Here, Harrington and Kemple describe Simmel’s applicability in reading the pervasive effects of money in our own century: its flattening out of “customary ties of economic reciprocity,” for example, and its creation not of liquefaction, but rather of rigid monetized debt relations and a “veneer of spurious moral authority” (17).
- 58.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan makes this distinction as it connects to the child seeing himself (or herself) in the mirror: “By clinging to the reference-point of him who looks at him in a mirror, the subject sees appearing, not his ego ideal, but his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify himself in himself” (257).
- 59.
This claim, admittedly, is slightly unfair to the marginalists. For example, in his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1900), Jevons constructs useful histories of coins, the use of metals as currency, and systems of metallic money, adducing numerous examples from ancient cultures, primitive ones, and European history, recent and more remote. See Jevons, 40–65 and 85–103.
- 60.
Goodstein, 152.
- 61.
Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume 1: 435. Here Holroyd is quoting from Shaw’s letters.
- 62.
See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume 2: 1898–1918: The Pursuit of Power (New York: Random House, 1989), 282.
- 63.
Bernard Shaw, Letter to Stella Campbell, 19 August 1912, in Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence, ed. Alan Dent (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952), 40–41. Stella replied gaily on August 31, “It’s a real delight to read this nonsensical play of yours. But I do wonder what you’ll do without me for Eliza” (41).
- 64.
This letter appears in its entirety in both Harris’s biography (234–38) and in Collected Letters, 1926–1950, vol. 4: 190–93. The former is a more fastidiously punctuated version of the latter.
- 65.
Goodstein, 17.
- 66.
Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” SE 20: 18. In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay repeats the 75-year-old Freud’s remarks at the unveiling: “Deep within me, covered over, there still lives that happy child from Freiberg …” (9).
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Watt, S. (2018). The Materialist Dream Theatre: Affect and Value, Freud and Simmel. In: Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71513-1_2
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