Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  What adds an even more fascinating dimension to this is that Freud himself shows striking evidence of having been a “precog,” foreseeing/foretelling some of the most significant moments in his later life in his dreams and neurotic symptoms. Thus, we cannot mine psychoanalysis for guidance in exploring precognition and time loops without simultaneously examining and deconstructing Freud’s own defenses against—or you might say repression of —the whole possibility of information refluxing from our future. Repression of prophecy was intrinsic to Freud’s own “Oedipus complex” and is a side of one of the most influential men of the 20th century that has gone largely unexamined.

  The Medallion

  Oedipus the King was Freud’s favorite ancient drama long before psychoanalysis or the mysteries of infantile sexuality were even glimmers in his eye. When he was a medical student at the University of Vienna, the young Freud would stroll among the busts of great scholars who had taught at the institution and fantasize that his own bust would one day be among them, inscribed with a line from Sophocles’ tragedy: “Who divined the famed riddle and was a man most mighty.” Even as a young man, Freud had tremendous ambition and a sense of his own greatness.

  Over three decades later, in 1906, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, the increasingly well-known explorer of human self-ignorance was presented with a medallion by a small group of his Viennese followers. On one side it showed his face in profile; on the other, it showed Oedipus standing before the Sphinx and was inscribed with that exact line from Sophocles … even though the honoree had never told anyone of the quote’s significance to him.

  Freud’s friend and official biographer, the English Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, recorded that when the father of psychoanalysis read the inscription, he “became pale and agitated and in a strangled voice demanded to know who had thought of it. He behaved as if he had encountered a revenant …” 3

  Peter J. Rudnytsky, reflecting on the importance of that moment for Freud, writes that “Freud’s loss of composure upon being honored by his followers is attributable to the blurring of the boundary between inner and outer worlds, as fantasy unexpectedly becomes reality.” 4 Standard psychoanalytic thinking holds that our desires for success are linked with early childhood ideas of taking the father’s place, which are retained in the unconscious like ancient bugs trapped in amber. Like Oedipus himself, Freud unexpectedly got the forbidden thing he had wished for—or was well on the way to getting it—and he suddenly felt great trepidation at the realization. The cost of getting our deepest wishes is punishment for our crimes: for a boy, castration; for a man, death. 5 A man’s 50th birthday is never really a happy milestone anyway; it merely highlights the inevitability of aging and mortality. As a student, he had wished for fame and honor like those inscribed busts, but now, did he really want to be a dead man memorialized by the living?

  The possibility that Freud’s youthful “fantasy” had really been a premonition, and that realizing that fact is what really threatened Freud so deeply at his birthday celebration, is never even suggested by Freud scholars, because Freud himself effectively banished any whiff of prophecy from psychoanalysis. When he homed in on the Oedipus story and elevated it to the key archetype of the human psyche in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams , it was enough for him that children fall in love with their opposite-sex parent, feel jealous of their same-sex parent, and never quite resolve these feelings. He consciously disregarded the fact that Oedipus’s killing his father had been prophesied and that it was precisely in trying to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that the Theban prince did end up committing those acts. Freud assured his readers that it was only the universality of the incestuous desires depicted in Sophocles’ tragedy that made the work so enduring. Myriad other ancient stories about fate and the prophecies it makes possible have been forgotten, he asserted, because they just offend our modern, less superstitious sensibilities. 6

  In a brief paper called “A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled” written in 1899, the same year J. W. Dunne dreamed about his stopped watch in a Sussex hotel room, 7 Freud devoted his considerable forensic intellect to debunking an ostensibly precognitive dream of one of his female patients, “Frau B.” Her dream was a typical Dunne dream, but pretty vanilla stuff. This “estimable woman who moreover possesses a critical sense” told Dr. Freud that she once, years earlier, dreamed she encountered her old family doctor and friend, “Dr. K.,” in a specific spot (“in the Kärntnerstrasse in front of Hiess’s shop”), and the next day she ran into Herr K. at the precise spot she had dreamed. 8

  It was convenient for Freud that the alleged incident had happened well in the past, that Frau B. had not written down her dream, and that she said she had not actually recalled having the dream until after she had her real-life encounter with Dr. K. Treating her notion that she’d had a premonitory dream instead as a fantasy, Freud delved into the patient’s past for a psychoanalytic reason, a “justification,” for confabulating her dream-memory after her encounter with Dr. K. It was easy for him to come up with a plausible-enough story—at least, if you accept the sometimes-Byzantine inner-world soap operas that characterize Freudian interpretations.

  It turned out that 25 years before this event, when pining for a gentleman with whom Frau B. had been having an extramarital affair—also coincidentally a “Dr. K.”—the object of her secret affections paid her a visit at her home, and this at the time seemed to her uncannily coincidental. (Freud correctly remarks here that the fact that she was always thinking of the man, and that he was always visiting her, made it inevitable that one of his visits would coincide with her thoughts of him; “accidents which seem preconcerted like this are to be found in every love story.”) Fast-forward to the time of the dream, when the now-twice-widowed Frau B. was able to see her still-paramour Dr. K. openly. Based on the past history, Freud argued that his patient’s encounter with the other Dr. K. on the street triggered a fantasy that she had already dreamed about it , and that this effectively masked a wish related to her lover. Freud needed a lot of “frog DNA” to justify his reframing. “Let us suppose,” he writes,

  that during the few days before the dream she had been expecting a visit from [Dr. K.], but that this had not taken place—he was no longer so pressing as he used to be. She may then have quite well had a nostalgic dream one night which took her back to the old days. Her dream was probably of a rendez-vous at the time of her love affair, and the chain of her dream-thoughts carried her back to the occasion when, without any pre-arrangement, he had come in at the very moment at which she had been longing for him. She probably had dreams of this kind quite often now; they were a part of the belated punishment with which a woman pays for her youthful cruelty. 9

  Frau B. then ran into the other Dr. K, whom “we may suppose … had been used in her thoughts, and perhaps in her dreams as well, as a screen figure behind which she concealed the better-loved figure of the other Dr. K.” 10 This would have jogged a vague memory of the nostalgic dream Freud supposed she really had had, which was then mostly forgotten. Since the present situation (a “rendez-vous”) was similar to that supposed real dream, she substituted the present Dr. K., and the place where she ran into him, in place of the other Dr. K. and their romantic dream-rendezvous.

  “Let us suppose … She must have … She may have … ” As a spokesman for the unconscious, Dr. Freud spun a nice just-so story, one that is supported by nothing Frau B. actually told him about her dream. It is a tapestry of supposition, not unlike Martin Gardner’s “explanation” of how Morgan Robertson might have come by the name Titan for his fictional doomed ocean liner. Nevertheless, Freud writes that Frau B. “was obliged to accept [his] account of what happened, which seems to me more plausible, without raising any objection to it.“ 11 He concludes, confidently, that “the creation of a dream after the event, which alone makes prophetic dreams possible, is nothing other than a form of censoring, thanks to which the dream is able to make its way through into consciousness.” 12

/>   Are Freud’s strained “must haves” and “probablys” really more plausible than the far simpler notion that Frau B. did in fact dream of Dr. K. the night before she met him, just as she reported?

  Collecting the Bricks

  Freud’s objection to the possibility that Frau B.’s dream was really precognitive was not out of a rejection of psychical mechanisms operative in human life. Over the course of his career he became increasingly open to other “occult” phenomena like telepathy (or what he called “ thought transference”). But in 1899, the familiar folkloric notion that people sometimes have prophetic dreams could only be an unwelcome gnat, distracting attention from his bold new theory that all dreams, whatever their surface appearance, are really disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes , often wishes of a sexual nature. It did not occur to Freud, in 1899 or ever, that dreams could both show us our wishes and show us the future, or that they could even do the one in service of the other. It did not occur to him, for example, that Frau B.’s wish to encounter her lover might have primed her to precognize running into his namesake in the street on the night before it happened.

  Dunne was well aware of Freud’s theories about dreams, and unlike Freud he saw no conflict between the wish-fulfillment theory and the idea that dreams can also predict the future. In fact, it seemed plain to him that dreams may reach into the future for the props and characters and stage sets to create tableaux that serve whatever purpose dreams serve, as much as they reach into our past.

  Many people, I hear, suppose that there is some clash between serialism and the ‘wish-fulfillment’ theory of dreams. There is none. ‘Wish-fulfillment’ theories are concerned with explaining why the dreamer builds a particular dream edifice: I am interested in the quite different question of whence he collects the bricks. 13

  A famous dream that opens Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams is a concise and heartbreaking example of the wish-fulfillment idea, and perhaps because of that, no one seems to notice that it was also a very typical Dunne dream about an alarming discovery in the dreamer’s imminent future:

  A father had been watching beside his child’s sickbed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. 14

  Freud argued—sensibly, as far as it goes—that the dream enabled the father to continue sleeping for a few precious seconds with this dream image of his beloved child rather than make him rise immediately to put out the fire that had started in the next room:

  The dead child behaved in the dream like a living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and caught him by the arm, just as he had probably done on the occasion from the memory of which the first part of the child’s words in the dream were derived. For the sake of the fulfillment of this wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time. 15

  But when we ignore the precognitive possibility, other aspects of the dream become hard to explain. If dreams are wish fulfillments that help us prolong sleep, as Freud contended, what actually woke the sleeping man, catapulting him back into the terrible reality of his grief and a fire he needed to put out? This dream has proven a favorite headscratcher for Freud’s later commentators, and among the mysteries is how exactly the man’s sleeping mind “knew” what was happening in the next room. Even assuming he was able to tell there was a fire (i.e., perhaps from glare detected through his shut eyelids or a subtle smell of cloth burning), how would his unconscious have determined that it was his child’s sleeve that had caught fire and not something else in the room? Why did the smell of smoke not wake the man sitting watch right next to the child, if it was able to wake the father? We are simply to accept from Freud’s account that the grieving father’s super-sensitive and superintelligent unconscious drew a remarkably correct inference based on sense data received while asleep in another room.

  The unconscious has been regarded since Freud, and even before, as far more sensitive than our conscious mind; it somehow “knows” more and can infer more from available information. In his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , Freud deployed the super-abilities of the unconscious to explain away many familiar superstitions and the kinds of meaningful coincidences Jung later called “synchronicity,” such as the familiar experience of thinking about some random person just before running into them. For instance, Freud reports having had a sudden fantasy, while walking along a Vienna street, about a couple who had rejected his services for their daughter months earlier—the fantasy was that they would now respect his authority since he had just been named Professor. Just then he heard himself addressed, “Good day to you, Professor!” It was the very couple he had just been thinking of, coming down the street. To explain this coincidence, Freud supposes that he had looked up to the street ahead just before his fantasy and unconsciously recognized their approach but blotted out the conscious awareness through “negative hallucination” while his mind could prepare his little wish-scene—analogous to the notion that the sleeping father’s mind preferred to remain with the fantasy of his son for a few seconds rather than respond to a fire in the next room. 16 Again, his explanation substitutes a rather elaborate and convoluted cognitive mechanism for the more parsimonious idea that he simply “pre-sensed” an encounter with the couple just before it happened. Freud’s explanation has the advantage, however, that it does not fly in the face of our commonsense understanding of causal order.

  The super-sensitivity of the unconscious was not original to Freud. By the time he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams , Victorian psychiatrists had long been wrestling with the paradoxically enhanced perception, memory, and intelligence sometimes displayed by hysterics when under hypnosis and, especially, displayed by hysterical patients with secondary, split-off personalities (a common symptom seen in the last quarter of the 19th century, an early form of what is today called multiple personality disorder). 17 Interestingly, psychical researchers of the day played an important role in the evolving psychiatric and psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious mind as super-sensitive and, in its own way, superintelligent. Like hypnotized hysterics, spiritualist mediums in their self-induced trances were often able to access seemingly impossible information, even when trickery was ruled out through careful observation. It was explained that their subliminal sensitivities were so acute that they could “read” a sitter and extract cues that appeared to most witnesses like accessing information from some occult source. 18 Already in 1886, Charles Richet had proposed the existence of an unconscious part of the intellect sequestered from conscious awareness, and he made his proposal specifically in the context of providing a physiological explanation for table turning and other feats of spiritualists. Because unconscious thoughts and muscle movements originate outside of conscious awareness, he argued, they feel alien and are readily interpreted as originating with spirits or other entities. 19

  The unconscious, as an “other” inside, is, when you think about it, really a very “occult” idea. Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” 20 naturally invited a suspicious rationalist skepticism in return. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, could n
ot abide an unconscious formation in the psyche. To him, it smacked of bad faith , inauthenticity, the failure to take responsibility for our actions. For instance, he pointed out the contradiction inherent in the idea of a “censor” in the mind that could be aware enough of what it was censoring to form a judgment yet also be completely alien to our conscious experience. The “resistance” that impedes patients from developing self-insight implies a similar non-aware awareness: “the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist.” 21 There is no unconscious, Sartre argued, just the avoidance of responsibility.

  Claims of an unconscious mind that could only be explored through a highly subjective process of interpretation also offended the philosopher of science Karl Popper, one of Freud’s harshest critics. How would you test claims about an unconscious? Psychoanalysis is not a science, Popper contended, not only because its claims cannot be falsified but also because the clinical situation, with suggestible patients in a kind of trance-like thrall to their doctor, is an echo chamber—a machine for producing evidence in support of its premises (the usual meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy”). 22

  Although 20th -century psychological science and neuroscience rejected Freud (and ignored Freud’s contemporaries in psychical research), it ultimately came around to embracing some notion of an unconscious—or what came to be called “implicit processing”—as a domain of cognitive functioning that is hypersensitive to subliminal signals and much quicker at making inferences and judgments than the conscious mind. Abundant experimental evidence shows implicit processing’s overriding dominance over anything like conscious will. A large school of thought, much of it inspired by Benjamin Libet’s work described in the preceding chapter, holds that we are mere spectators of our lives and that conscious will is an illusion, a kind of overlay. If the unconscious was for Freud the submerged majority of the iceberg, for some contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, it is all submerged—the tip is a mirage. We are unaware of the bulk of what seems to occur in our heads—there is thinking, sensing, and feeling that is not thought, sensed, or felt, and our non-experience of this huge domain is much more than a matter of bad faith (although there is that also). As with Freud’s unconscious, you can only probe the implicit domain indirectly, obliquely, via tools and paradigms such as priming tasks, like the ones Daryl Bem inverted in some of his “feeling the future” experiments.