"It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis"
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Machen’s dismissal lands with the clipped impatience of a writer watching a fashionable certainty harden into dogma. “It is all nonsense, to be sure” isn’t just skepticism; it’s an attempt to puncture the early-20th-century confidence that dreams can be made to confess their meaning on command. The sly turn is in the second clause: “so much the greater nonsense” because psychoanalysis isn’t merely wrong in particular cases, it’s wrong in its direction of travel. Machen’s jab is methodological. Freud’s system trains the reader to dig downward - symptom to cause, image to repressed wish - like a moral detective story. Machen implies that many dreams don’t yield by excavation. They move “in the opposite direction”: not from surface disguise to hidden truth, but from an inward, private pressure toward something outward, symbolic, even metaphysical.
That’s classic Machen, a novelist of dread and revelation who treated the unconscious less as a basement of shame than as a corridor to the uncanny. His parenthetical hedge - “not by any means of all dreams” - matters. He isn’t denying that interpretation exists; he’s resisting the psychoanalytic monopoly on interpretation. The subtext is a defense of mystery as an aesthetic and spiritual resource, not a pathology to be cured.
Written in the era when Freudian language was becoming cultural currency, the line reads like a warning: when an interpretive tool becomes a worldview, it starts producing meanings the way a factory produces goods - reliably, predictably, and often, Machen suggests, against the grain of the material itself.
That’s classic Machen, a novelist of dread and revelation who treated the unconscious less as a basement of shame than as a corridor to the uncanny. His parenthetical hedge - “not by any means of all dreams” - matters. He isn’t denying that interpretation exists; he’s resisting the psychoanalytic monopoly on interpretation. The subtext is a defense of mystery as an aesthetic and spiritual resource, not a pathology to be cured.
Written in the era when Freudian language was becoming cultural currency, the line reads like a warning: when an interpretive tool becomes a worldview, it starts producing meanings the way a factory produces goods - reliably, predictably, and often, Machen suggests, against the grain of the material itself.
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| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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