Dreaming, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1999

Dreamwork as Etymology

Sarah White1,2

This essay proposes that etymology, the study of word roots, presents analogies withdreamwork, although parallels between them must be carefully framed. Quoting Freudand the seventh century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, weaknesses in their use ofetymological arguments are identified. Theories forged from word origins should notblur distinctions between word and thing or force linguistic process into support of apreconceived theoretical project. To explore Freud's notion of contraries in words anddreams, examples are offered of single Indo-European word roots capable ofengendering divergent or contradictory modem meanings, as well as examples ofdivergent or contradictory modern meanings for words that have two or morederivations, e.g., the English word "dream" and French reve. Tracing a place-name(Campidoglio) in an actual dream demonstrates that etymology and dreamwork areboth reconstructive processes that should avoid determinism, accept uncertainty, andrespect complexity.

KEY WORDS: dreamwork; etymology; historical linguistics.

[W]e could better understand . . . the language of dreams if we knew more about thehistory of language

(Freud, 1910b, 161)

This remark by Freud first lured me into the labyrinth of linguistic and psy-choanalytic thought. I wanted to see whether there really was a link between dream-work and etymology, and, if so, what the nature of that link might be. The editorsof this special issue offered further impetus to my cross-disciplinary venture, as didDaniel Deslauriers (1996) when he proposed that, by exploring word origins, "wepoetically re-create a web of meaning that reveals surprising connection[s]." Hissuggestion struck me as timely and valuable. Awareness of word roots, a culturalsine qua non in Freud's day, has in our time declined. I want to support and extend

1Department of French and Italian, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.2Correspondence should be directed to Sarah White, Department of French and Italian, Franklin andMarshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 17604-3003, U.S.A.

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Deslaurier's notion that contemporary dream students would profit by heighteningtheir attention to language and its history.

Of course, when researchers explore dream imagery, they often pose questionsof origin. They ask what residues of the preceding day, what recent or remote trau-mas, what remembered or unremembered experiences may have engendered thedream. Moreover, in pursuit of these origins, they often consider words and theirassociations. However, attention to words and their connotations does not neces-sarily mean attention to word roots. The etymological thread is only one of manythat make up Deslauriers' poetic "web" of word associations. In the heady literatureof language and the unconscious, greater emphasis is given to words' semantic, pho-netic, metaphoric, and metonymic links (States, 1988; Stevens, 1995; Wilden, 1968).Of all the word sciences, etymology is now perhaps the least valued as a source ofinformation about either language or the unconscious. For example, Paul Kugler(1982, 22-28), in a fluent Jungian essay, The Alchemy of Discourse, downplays ety-mology in favor of phonology (sound/sense) as a key to the syntax of unconsciouslanguage. He argues emphatically for replacing historical (diachronic) linguisticswith a Saussurian relational (synchronic) linguistics more compatible with his ownand Jung's archetypal imago mundi. Still, historical linguistics has survived the Saus-surian revolution (Ducrot, 1979,137). It remains a respected discipline that deservesmore frequent consultation, if only to check the free-fall of our associative proc-esses, either during waking or dreaming.

THE ETYMOLOGICAL TRADITION

"Etymology," our term for the study of word origins, derives from the Greeketumos, true, real. Of course, this derivation constitutes no proof that the origin ofa name conveys the reality of the thing named. Nor does the root of this or anyother word determine its modern meaning. The derivation of "etymology" merelyimplies that, early in the development of modern European languages, there wasa sense that some kind of truth resided in word roots. We have not lost that sense;nor need we do so, although we must question it, avoiding the flawed methods andextravagant claims that have often contaminated etymological arguments.

The most far-reaching advocate of word roots as a source of irrefutable truthwas probably Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century encyclopedist whose Etymolo-giae wielded influence for centuries as a compendium of derivations and definitions."When you see the origin of a name," claimed Isidore, "you will more readily un-derstand its nature" (1983,4). Although a modern reader might ask whether Isidoremeant the "origin" (Latin ortum) of the signifying word or that of the thing signified,he did not find it necessary to make such a distinction: "For once a thing's ety-mology is known it becomes easier to understand." Although students of etymologycan no longer accept such overly optimistic and conceptually imprecise formula-tions, they still believe that much can be learned from tracing word origins.

For at least twelve centuries after Isidore, theorists continued to rely on lan-guage origins as material for arguments about history, society, and metaphysics.3

Thus, we are not surprised to find Freud, that assiduous crypto-archaeologist, in-

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voking philology and historical linguistics to support his theories. His papers andletters often allude to etymology4 and adduce linguistic hypotheses as analogous topsychoanalytic ones. He most forcefully argued from word origins in his 1910 paper,"On the Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," (1910a), which concludes withthe bold flourish from which I take my epigraph: "Psychiatrists are forced to acceptthe incontrovertible supposition5 that we could better understand and more easilytranslate the language of dreams if we knew more about the history of language"(161).

The antithetical meanings referred to in Freud's title are borrowed froman 1884 pamphlet by Karl Abel, specialist in Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, andproto-Indo-European languages. Freud's interest in Abel's work was in the al-leged discovery of "primitive" words, "ur-words," in which "antithetical mean-ings are united," as in "words meaning equally 'strong' or 'weak,' 'command' or'obey,' or compound words like 'old-young,' 'far-near.'" Freud cited these ob-servations as lending credence to his own theory that the manifest content ofdreams frequently replaces the latent meaning by its contrary, or represents twocontrary meanings in a single symbol "so that there is no way of deciding atfirst glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in thedream-thoughts as a positive or a negative" (SE, 1900, IV, 318; SE, 1910, XI,155).

Freud's paper and the linguistic examples on which it relies have been refutedby the eminent French linguist Emile Benveniste (1971). He disputes Abel's exam-ples as well as the notion that antithetical words were especially common in "pri-mal" or "primitive" languages.6 A recent essay by Paul Gordon (1990) accuses bothFreud and Benveniste of wrongly assuming that primal language, like "primaryprocess," tends to express itself antithetically while "real" language and consciousthought do not. Further, Gordon suggests that when we "translate" an original,allegedly antithetical dream-symbol into rational, unambiguous Logos, we seriouslydiminish the power of the image.

Consider, for example, the spray of red flowers in a dream used by Freud toillustrate his positive/negative principle. The dreamer, a middle-aged, unmarriedwoman, ". . . was holding a big branch in her hand; actually it was like a tree,covered over with red blossoms . . . . There was an idea of their being cherry blos-soms; but they also looked like double camellias . . . [T]he lower blossoms werealready a good deal faded" (SE, IV, VI, 319; Kugler, 1982, 18). Freud relies onan allusion (the dreamer's? Freud's own?) to the courtesan, La Dame aux Camelias,

3For a masterful summary of this tradition, see Bloch (1983, 1-29).4Guttman, Concordance to the Standard Edition, (II, 490), reports seven references under Etymological,etc. Carol Schreier Rupprecht's work and Kugler's study remind me that Jung also saw linguistics andphilology as models for psychological analysis.

5I have modified the translation in the Standard Edition ("We psychiatrists cannot escape thesuspicion . . .") which does not convey the vehemence of the claim made in the original: "Und alsunabweisbare Vermutung drangt sich uns Psychiatern auf. . ." (1910b).

6See also Calvert Watkins (1988, 1488): "Reconstructed words and particularly roots are often assignedhazy, vague, or unspecific meanings. This is doubtless quite illusory . . . . The apparent haziness inmeaning of a given Indo-European root often simply reflects the fact that with the passage of severalmillennia the different words in divergent languages derived from this root have undergone semanticchanges that are no longer recoverable in detail."

Dreamwork as Etymology 13

who wore a white camellia on her gown except during her periods when she worea red one. He concludes that the flowers represent "both sexual innocence and itscontrary." But camellias and cherry blossoms, red and white, have time-honoredassociations with all sorts of transitory beauty (see Serinity Young's paper in thisissue) and surely suggest more than just the two antithetical meanings with whichFreud clinches his analysis. There remains the further problem of explainingjust what the "contrary" of "sexual innocence" would be: sexual guilt? sexualknowledge? a lot? a little?

Freud, like Isidore of Seville, propounded the philology that would supporthis own theoretical project. Isidore's derivation of homo, man, from humus, soil,dust (Isidore, 1983) tells us more about one early phase of Christian belief (Bloch,1983, 55) than about human evolution. Nietzche's striking etymological passages inThe Genealogy of Morals (1956, 162), teach us more about his ethics than aboutthe Indo-European roots of the words for "good" and "bad." Similarly, Freud,evokes linguistic history that confirms his own theoretical practice.

In his etymology we recognize his usual privileging of sexual meanings overother plausible associations: "In dreams symbols are used almost exclusively for theexpression of sexual objects and relations" (SE, 1915-16, XV, 166). In The Intro-ductory Lectures, Freud cites "a philologist, Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, who worksindependently of psycho-analysis [and] has put forward the argument that sexualneeds have played the biggest part in the origin and development of speech. Ac-cording to him, the original sounds of speech . . . summoned the speaker's sexualpartner . . ." (SE, 1915-16, XV, 169). Because Freud sees dreams primarily as en-coded sexual messages, his version of etymology puts the hypothetical Censor towork displacing latent sexual signifieds with contrary non-sexual signifiers, notablydisplacing "yes" with "no," which is a word "not to be found in dreams" (SE, XV,178).

Above all, in Freud's etymology we recognize his penchant for startling an-titheses. His habit of demonstration by contraries is perhaps most famously exem-plified in the interpretation of a recurrent "Wolf Man" dream (1915, SE, XVII,30-35). For Freud the stillness of wolves on a branch is to be read as the violentmotion of parental intercourse witnessed in childhood; likewise, the wolves' intentgazing at the dreamer is translated as its opposite—the child's intent gazing at aprimal scene.

ETYMOLOGY AS A RECONSTRUCTIVE PROCESS

Although Freud weakened his argument for antithetical meanings by usingflawed linguistic data as evidence for his theory, his etymological intuition remainsintriguing. I believe that there are solid grounds for exploring etymological originsof dream imagery. We can learn from word origins without forcing them to servetheological purposes like Isidore's or theory-building missions like Freud's. It seemsto me that we can, after all, entertain Deslauriers' playful proposal that "etymologyis not unlike dreamwork." There are several ways in which the hermeneutics ofone discipline might inform the practice of the other.

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The historical linguist reconstructs lost, unattested words by observing mod-ern words and tracing patterns in the changes they have undergone. "We can,for example, state it as a rule that the p and the d of the Greek stem pod-, foot,will correspond to the f and the t of the English foot" (Watkins, 1995, 5). Whentwo or more modern words are observed to resemble one another formally, andwhen it is determined that the resemblance is not explicable by chance, by directborrowing, or by some trait of nature (e.g., onomatopoeia), the historical linguisttraces these words back through earlier attested forms, exploring paths by whichthey may plausibly derive from a single hypothetical proto-Indo-European ances-tor.

Similarly, investigators working with their own or others' dreams attend to bothpresent and past, heeding current dream symbols and their antecedents in thedreamer's experience and fantasies (including earlier dreams), heeding what canbe observed about the individual dreamer's styles of transforming experience. Thesemental styles are, of course, more idiosyncratic, less predictable, and less demon-strable than linguistic changes, which are shared and can be widely observed. Still,the dreamworker may hope to arrive at a viable hypothesis about experiences—re-membered or forgotten—that are affecting current dreams. Observing patterns ofchange and reconstructing associative links are crucial to the work of the etymolo-gist, just as following "metonymic chains" enhances the understanding of dreams(States, 1995).

Further, both types of investigation involve forging thematic connections be-tween disparate, and at times contradictory, elements and ideas. For example, inan instance of seemingly antithetical meaning, the French word, blanc, white, for-mally resembles the English word, "black." We learn from etymology (Buck, 1988,1054-55; Watkins, 1978, 1508) that the two do indeed belong to the same wordfamily, and derive from a single proto-Indo-European root, *-bhel, although it isnot the case that this "ur-word" meant (ambiguously) both "black" and "white."The root more probably denoted "shining, flashing, burning," an event that mayproduce either the whiteness of all-color or the blackness of no color.

To cite another example in which a single root has the capacity to generateseemingly incompatible modern meanings, "studious" and "stupid" both derive from*-steu, "to knock, pound" (Watkins, 1978, 1543). This rich Indo-European root-also the ancestor of "drumming," and coughing ("pertussis")—reminds us that to"pound the books" or to have ideas "pounded" into your head may make you stu-dious—and it may be stunning.

Similarly, in French, the noun "hote," which denotes both "host" and"guest" and belongs to the same family of words as "hotel," and "hospital,"is derived from the Indo-European root *-ghosti, "stranger" (Watkins, 1978,1518). The root notion, then, appears to be neither "host" nor "guest" buta complex of possible relations between strangers. The same root also givesrise to "hostile" (from Latin hostis, army), reminding us that word families,like human families, may contain more than one kind of contrary (host/guest,hospitable/hostile). Thus, etymology suggests that we work with apparent con-tradictions in dreams by reconstructing some fundamental experience, con-

Dreamwork as Etymology 15

cern, or fantasy capable of generating divergent or opposing elements of psychiclife and dream imagery.7

There are, of course, words whose genesis, like that of many dreams, remainsradically uncertain, etymological problems that cannot be resolved by citing a singleencompassing root-word or root-notion. In such instances, the historical linguist,like the dream investigator, remains at a loss to give a simple account of derivation.This is so in the case of the modern word "dream." According to Ernest Klein'sComprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1966, I, 481),"dream" is derived from "Middle English (ME) dreem, dreme, related to Old Saxon(OS) drom . . . . These words probably come from Teutonic *drauma- (for*draugma-), which literally mean 'deception, illusion, phantom,' and accordingly arerelated to Old Norse (ON) draugr, OS gidrog, [and] Old High German (OHG)triogan, to lie (cf. G trugen, to deceive)." A quite different account is given in T.F. Hoad's Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1986, 135), where"dream," first attested in English in the 13th century, is said to come from "MEdrem, identical in form with the ME representation of OE dream, joy, jubilation,music, minstrelsy (= OS drom, mirth, noise), but corresponding in sense to OldFrisian dram, OS drom, OHG troum (G. traum), ON draumr, with which it may beidentical."

Thus, linguists do not know whether modern "dream" is descended from aword family designating "deception, illusion," from another group designating"mirth, music, and joy," or both. It would be fascinating if we could trace the twoseries, so different in connotation, back to a single root that might suggest somerelationship between the two meanings. It is tempting to imagine an ur-word forsomething capable of creating both illusion and noisy mirth, the way *stuo- yieldsboth studious and stupid, and *bhel- gives both "black" and "blanc." However, nosuch primal dream-root has been proposed. Instead, some etymologists suggest thatchance alone explains the resemblance between "dream" (modern English deriva-tive of OS drom, deception, etc., from the Indo-European root *dreugh-/drough-Idrugh-, to deceive) and "dream" (obsolete derivative of OE dream, jubilation, etc.).The Oxford English Dictionary (1989, IV, 1036), for example, supposes that twowords, separate in meaning, though fortuitously identical in sound, coexisted in Mid-dle English.

Another lexicographer, Robert K. Barnhart (1988, 300), gives both sets of deri-vations for dream and speculates that "Though dream is not recorded in Old Englishwith the meaning of a vision, the number of Germanic cognates [e.g. troum, traum]of the same meaning strongly suggests that the meaning existed in Old English,but that perhaps the prevailing sense of joy, music, precluded use in literature ofthe meaning of a vision, especially in sleep, for which swefn was substituted." Barn-

7This interpretive tactic is in fact similar to Freud's in the case of the red flower image: "And the samedream which expressed her joy at having succeeded in passing through life immaculately gave oneglimpses at certain points ... of the contrary train of ideas—of her having been guilty of various sinsagainst sexual purity (in her childhood, that is) . . . . [I]t is possible to distinguish the two trains ofthought, of which the consoling one seemed the more superficial and the self-reproachful one thedeeper-lying, trains of thought which were diametrically opposed to each other . . ." (SE, 1900, IV,319). However, the present suggestion is less rigorously binary than Freud's.

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hart concludes: "The two groups of cognates with the meaning of deceive, phantom,ghost, and joy, music, dream represent a double development of meaning."

A modern etymologist, unlike philologist Abel or psychoanalyst Freud, refrainsfrom explaining such a "double development" by positing a "primal" language inwhich antithetical notions were denoted by a single term. It simply is not knownwhether the process that brought the two semantic fields together in a single Englishword was systematic or purely fortuitous. We must therefore resist drawing conclu-sions regarding dreaming itself, or early attitudes to dreaming. Differences in theemotional connotations of joy and deception should caution us against assigningeither negative or positive affective value to the word or the fact of dreaming. Weare, however, free to reflect poetically on such incongruities, as Deslauriers suggests.We may even admire the spirit of Karl Abel's intuition that the development oflanguage reflects the multiplicity of experience. Thus "dream" may have come toimply joy or illusion or both or neither, but the contradictory meanings do not stemfrom any ambiguous "primal" word.

Similar paradoxes confront us when we examine the origins of French reve,dream, as in English reverie. According to Barnhart (1988, 923), reverie, first attestedin English as "ryvori, wild conduct, frolic, revelry; reverye, 1390, Canterbury Tales,borrowed from Old French (OF) reverie, revelry, raving, delirium, from rever, resver,to dream, wander, rave, of uncertain origin, perhaps ... from OF *esver to wander,cf. OF desver, to lose one's mind, with a change in prefix, possibly from Gallo-Ro-mance *esvo vagabond, from Vulgar Latin *exvagus ... or, according to others,related to the development of rave ... of uncertain origin." Thus, etymologicalstudy of reverie allows us to celebrate the pleasures of wandering and to bewarethe dangers of raving—but provides no evidence of the antithesis of these meaningswithin a single term.

Incidentally, it is etymologically accidental that the German Traum, dream, andTrauma, trauma, bear strong orthographic resemblance. The two are demonstrablyderived from separate roots: Traum = *dhreug, to deceive, and Trauma = *ter-, totwist, wound. Nonetheless, might one at least entertain the possibility that this for-tuitous resemblance entered the train of associations that led German-speaking psy-choanalysts to examine the Traum, dream, in search of evidence of Trauma, wound?

ETYMOLOGICALLY INFORMED DREAMWORK

I do not propose that dream analysts adopt a sweeping etymological metaphorthat would function as the archeological metaphor did for Freud (Kuspit, 1989,133). Nor do I envision a philologist/archeologist/dreamworker who, upon encoun-tering an "antithetical" dream symbol, proceeds to unearth some primitive lan-guage—fountain of occult truth or cauldron of ambiguous meanings—decoding itinto a rational, present-day language whose every word and symbol suggest onlyone thing, or only two opposed things. To hint at what etymologically informeddreamwork might look like, I offer the following discussion of a dream I had im-mediately after deciding to illustrate the present essay with a dream of my own:

Dreamwork as Etymology 17

I am in a poorly lit nocturnal landscape of Roman monuments. I hear that a homelessgirl has found a valuable stolen gold watch "on the Campidoglio." (The watch is worth$132,000!) Despite the darkness, I see the watch, which is spherical, not flat like anordinary wristwatch.

On waking, I was grateful that my dream process, usually immune to my attemptsat incubation, had promptly enlisted itself in an etymological project. In "Campi-doglio," a name absent from my conscious mind for many years, I recognized aword in Italian (a language I love, but know imperfectly) and a place-name withevident roots in Latin (a language I know even more imperfectly). I at first assumed,incorrectly, that the modern Italian meaning of "Campidoglio" is "fields of sorrow."From this I quickly concluded that the dream had been triggered by a letter I hadreceived the day before from a good friend who has spent many months in deepand difficult mourning. This poignant association occurred to me even as I remem-bered, correctly, that "fields of sorrow" was not the meaning of the Latin wordfrom which "Campidoglio" is derived. My initial mistaken etymology led me to thinkI had found a quasi-Freudian antithesis in the dream: a valuable object is discoveredin "fields of sorrow."

My initial idea of the dream's antithesis was not borne out by the actual deri-vation of "Campidoglio." I was right that "campi" can mean "fields." I was rightthat "doglioso" means "sorrowful," but wrong in thinking that "doglio" means "sor-row." The noun meaning "sorrow" is "doglia." There is in fact an Italian noun,"doglio," denoting "barrel" (Battaglia, 1961, III, 901), as the dictionary remindedme. On some level, I knew the word "doglio," which happens to lie within a verydifferent domain of my associations. Some twenty years ago in graduate school, Istudied and taught Boccaccio's Decameron. In one of its more ribald tales (Day 7,Tale 2), the lustful Peronella persuades her husband to climb inside a large barrel("doglio") and clean it out, while in the same room she enjoys intercourse with herlover. (I did not say dreams contain no sexual messages!)

Thus, I was mistaken in thinking that "campi" + "doglio" = "fields of sorrow."True, my mind, both waking and sleeping, has a perfect right to associate a groupof similar words, but I insist on distinguishing here between my own associationsand the dictionary evidence: neither "campi," fields, nor "doglia," sorrow, nor"duolo," mourning, nor "doglio," barrel, accounts for the name of the Roman site.Instead, I discovered (re-discovered, really) that "Campidoglio" is a Vulgar Latinversion (or "deformazione popolare," as the lexicographer puts it) of classical Latincapitolio, capital (Battaglia 1961, II, 603).

The actual Campidoglio is the highest of the seven Roman hills. In ancienttimes it served as location of the temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and becamethe most prestigious seat of Roman Imperial power. Centuries later, during theRenaissance, the Piazza del Campidoglio underwent a new phase of architecturaland artistic development at the hands of Michelangelo himself. In modern times,the Piazza remains the seat of Rome's main municipal offices. The idiom "salire[go up] al Campidoglio" is equivalent to the English "rise to great heights." So theCampidoglio is not a contradictory but an entirely congruent place on which tofind the handsome gold watch.

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My personal associations to Rome and the Campidoglio are multi-layered likethe site itself, and, like its name, have had several transformations. As a child, Ioften listened to my mother's reminiscences about her girlhood travels, includingtrips to Rome, where she acquired a lifelong interest in ancient monuments. Hertales enthralled, annoyed, and profoundly marked me. In my eyes, her peregrina-tions with my grandmother, a charming but irresponsible divorcee, made my motherboth a radiant traveler and a homeless girl.

A further stratum of association with Rome was laid down in my early twentieswhen I myself traveled to Italy as a depressed and anxious wife. My husband atthat time, who was deep in graduate studies of classical archaeology, attempted toacquaint me with the significance of Rome's major sites, but they were all turnedto fields of sorrow by my pervasive gloom. (How, after all, could my present travelslive up to my mother's remembered ones?) Rome soon became blurred and for-gotten, at least in my waking mind.

Over the years, these buried Italian fields accumulated new layers of signifi-cance, for example, in my lively studies of medieval Italian authors. They recentlyre-surfaced in even happier circumstances. A few weeks before the dream, I hadattended with my present partner a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart'sClemenza di Tito. The opera takes place in ancient Rome, and the Met decor con-sisted of stylized antique columns and statuary. The theme of the opera is the Em-peror Titus' forgiveness, the "clemency" he shows despite deep personal grievances.The singers and orchestra were all that could be wished; the Met is a place inwhich I take unbounded pleasure, and I am very happy with my friend. I did feelthat evening as if I had stumbled on a small fortune.

Thus, the dreamed Campidoglio seems not so much antithetical as polyvalent.Its actual etymology corrects and complements the false one that I found so per-suasive until the evidence forced me to abandon it. The Jungian Kugler would nodoubt deny that my intuited derivation was any more false than the one found inthe dictionary. The phonetic continuum duolo/doglia/doglioso/doglio would providehim with grounds for positing an archetype operative on a deep unconscious level.8

However, were I a therapist and were this my patient's dream, I would want toknow that "fields of sorrow" was the dreamer's own confabulation, and that "capi-tal" was not. Once that distinction had been established, "false" and "true" ety-mology could together elucidate the emotional ground of the dream.

If there is an antithesis in the dream, it seems not to lie in the contrariessorrow/good fortune, but in a tension between dark and light: "I see the watch[despite the nocturnal setting]." The paradox embodies that of dreaming itself,which happens in a psychic space at once familiar and inaccessible to consciousness,in a cerebral space at once deprived of daylight and illuminated by vigorous activityin the visual system (Hobson, 1988, 165; States, 1997).

By dreamlight I see the watch "which is spherical, not flat like an ordinarywristwatch." In current waking life, I am approaching retirement, and experiencingthe mundane concerns of a pre-pensioner (Is my Capital large enough?). In this

8For Kugler (1982,103), the personality has "its internal archetypal thesaurus, a psychic dictionary whichimaginally binds together archetypally related meanings through a parity of phonetic values."

Dreamwork as Etymology 19

context, the gold watch reminds me of the proverbial reward offered to retiringemployees. A quintessentially ambiguous symbol, it says: "Tick tick. Thanks for giv-ing us several decades of your life," and "Tick Tick. Who knows whether you haveany time left?" Of course, this dream doesn't present the girl with an "ordinary,""flat" wristwatch. Rather, it places her in a rounder world of over-lapping past,present, and future experience. My late mother's early junkets to Rome overlapwith my own forgotten wanderings as a young wife, my current gratitude for Mozartoperas and other clemencies of life, my pity and fear in response to a friend's be-reavement, and my excited apprehension of future homelessness: I am planning tosell my house when I retire ($132,000 would be a nice price!), and do not yet knowwhere I will live.

This sketchy sample does not constitute a radical or exhaustive kind of dream-work. It resembles much current analysis in its ways of collecting evidence, exer-cising judgment, and constructing sense. The linguistic and architectural evolutionof "Campidoglio" seems to parallel dream meanings accumulated since an originalstimulus: hearing reminiscences about Rome. Consistently with etymological prac-tice, I find more than one possible derivation for single dream elements—the dark-ness, or the homeless girl. The common vicissitudes of historical linguistics predictthat I will see disjunctions as well as conjunctions in the dream. One motif, theCampidoglio, evokes a site that has long remained in place like the psychic bondthat links me to my mother and her rootless (!) childhood. But another motif, thegold watch, betrays drastic discontinuity. The watch has been stolen. There is notelling where it came from, who stole it, or where it has been hidden since thetime of its disappearance. Its origin and history, like those of "dream" and "reve,"remain obscure. I take the watch ("watch out!") as an amulet against totalizingtheories of origin, tempting as they may be.

"If we knew more about the history of language ..." mused Freud. Even thosewho know more than he knew about the history of language possess no key withwhich to "understand" or "easily translate" the language of dreams. Still, a modest,conscientious, and creative etymology deserves a place among the tools of thosewho study dreams. Like dreamwork, it tracks the continuous evolution of wordsand experience, noting antitheses, connections, shifts, and breaks, allowing for am-biguous meaning in the present as well as the past. Like any historical consciousness,etymology enhances our sense of present complexity and deepens our respect forthe generative power of language and dreaming.

REFERENCES

Barnhart, Robert K. (1988). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, New York: H.W. Wilson Co.Battaglia, Salvatore, ed. (1961). Grande Dizionario della lingua Italiana, Turin, Unione Tipografico

Sociale Torinese.Benveniste, Emile (1971). "Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory," in Problems in

General Linguistics, Coral Gables, FLA: University of Miami Press.Bloch, R. Howard (1983). Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the Middle Ages,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Boccaccio (1960). Il Decamerone, ed. V. Branca, Florence: Le Monnier.

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Buck, Carl Darling (1988). A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1986). ed. T.F. Hoad, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Deslauriers, Daniel (1996). "Dreaming of Origins: The Etymology of Dream-related words," paper

presented at the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams,Claremont Hotel, Berkeley, California, July 9-13.

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