I agree with Freud on the wish for youth expressed by Rosegger’s dream and fulfilled by way of a regression. But neither Freud, bent on introducing a sexual element into his interpretation, nor Maeder, overfond of moralizing, seem to have realized the tremendous meaning of such a series of dreams, culminating as they did in a changed attitude to life.
I have shown in another book, “Psychoanalysis and Behavior,” that in cases of dual personalities, the second personality is always one that leads a simpler, less arduous life, fraught with lesser responsibilities, than the normal life led by the first personality. The Rev. Ansel Bourne, being tired and needing rest, was transformed for several weeks into A. Brown, a fruit dealer in a small town far away from his home. Miss Beauchamp, prim, overconsciencious, repressed, became the irresponsible Sallie, devoid of manners or taste. The Rev. Thomas Carson Hanna, overworked and a spiritual disciplinarian, woke up from a fit of unconsciousness a newborn baby, helpless and in-organized.
Rosegger, rising from manual to intellectual labour, compelled to adapt himself to the mannerisms of a different world, and to adopt a new set of social habits and customs for which his bringing up in a proletarian home had not prepared him, compelled also to ransack his brain constantly for new ideas to express or for new forms in which to clothe old ideas, may have at times regretted unconsciously the simpler life of a tailor, less rich in egotistical satisfactions but more comfortable intellectually and requiring infinitely less ingenuity.
And some of the remarks which he appends to his dream, confirm my suspicions.
What does he say of his awakening? “I felt as if I had just newly recovered this idylically sweet life of mine, peaceful, poetical, spiritualized, in which so often I had realized human happiness to the uttermost.”
Undoubtedly he had for a long while failed to enjoy it and unconsciously planned to escape from it through a regression to his former estate.
Several lines further down the page we find this statement which is, I think, absolutely conclusive proof of what his mental attitude had been and of the crisis he had lived through.
“I no longer dream of my tailoring days which in their way were so jolly in their simplicity and without demands.”
Rosegger’s dream is one of those morbid manifestations which enable us to follow a neurotic struggle going on within the organism, a struggle for adaptation to life, a struggle of which the subject is consciously ignorant, because he has burnt his bridges and has repressed the most fleeting thought of a possible change.
Rosegger must have smarted under the demands of his new life, but it was out of the question for him to do anything else. The conflict, however, played itself off in his dreams, offering a solution of a regressive type. When, years later, the tailor’s adaptation to the life of a writer was completed, his master dismissed him. The dream solution was no longer needed.