Freud's B'nai B'rith Dream: Having Lost His Way, His "Brethren … Were Unkind and Scornful …"

On Tuesday, April 24, 1900, three days after Passover, Freud gave a talk at his B'nai B'rith lodge on Emile Zola's utopian novel penned in self-exile in London, Fécondité (1899). The next day Freud wrote Wilhelm Fliess that the night before the talk he had a dream in which "[t]he brethren … were unkind and scornful of me." In the dream his brethren's contempt signifies that Freud is making his impious move to destroy their Tree of Life: no Law, no Judaism, no Christianity, no miserable anti-Semitism. In Freud's utopia, an enlightened socially just world grounded in reason, which mirrors the brotherly atheistic utopia envisioned in Fécondité, the seed of Abraham at long last can move across frontiers freely, develop their talents, and satisfy their needs.