The Interpretation of Dreams: 

A Freudian reading of The Abominable Bride (Part 1) 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

In The Abominable Bride, Sherlock makes reference to “an Viennese alienist”. "Alienist“ is an archaic word for a doctor who treats the insane, or what we would now call a psychiatrist, which makes this a clear reference to the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, who was busy developing his psychoanalytic practice and theories in the 1890s in Austria. In this scene, Sherlock is complaining about John asking questions that are inappropriate from anyone but one’s psychoanalyst. But is there another reason Sherlock might have Freud on the brain?

Possibly it’s because Freud was notoriously experimenting with cocaine at almost exactly the same time the original Sherlock Holmes was concocting his 7% solution.

Or perhaps because most of The Abominable Bride is an elaborate, extended dream sequence, and one of Freud’s most significant works from this era is called The Interpretation of Dreams.

For Freud, dream interpretation is a way of accessing the unconscious mind. What does Freud mean by the unconscious? According to the theory, the unconscious is a part of the mind kept hidden from us under most circumstances. Freud believed that humans are excellent secret-keepers, and there is no one we are more inclined to deceive than ourselves. The unconscious mind holds all of our darkest desires, fears, and obsessions. It affects our daily lives and the choices we make, and yet we only get occasional glimpses of its workings.

Freud argues that dream analysis is one method of uncovering the secrets of the unconscious. Would Sherlock Holmes agree? It’s tempting to assume that Sherlock would dismiss Freud’s ideas as a lot of untestable, pseudo-scientifc blather (plenty of real humans have!). The Abominable Bride, however, gives us some indications that Sherlock is at least willing to play with Freud’s approach.

Freud’s interest in dreams comes from the idea that in sleep, the mind lets down some of its carefully constructed defenses, and allows usually hidden material to rise to the surface (if only in weirdly altered forms). If we believe Sherlock’s claim that he deliberately self-administered a cocktail of drugs in order to unearth clues and make connections about Moriarty’s death, well… that sounds like a pretty similar approach.

That Sherlock should be interested in navigating the unconscious is itself a bit surprising. In Freud’s understanding, the unconscious mind is totally amoral, irrational, chaotic, and pleasure-focused – in other words, everything Sherlock Holmes consciously abhors. Nevertheless, Sherlock appears to recognize that the key to Moriarty’s return is already contained in his own mind, though inaccessible by normal means. This is what Mycroft means when he says "The Mind Palace is a memory technique.” 

The mind palace is a mnemonic device for accessing memories using the conscious mind. What Sherlock is doing in The Abominable Bride – digging deep into unconscious mind for repressed thoughts and memories – is very different.

In order to understand what Sherlock uncovers in The Abominable Bride, it’s helpful to know a bit about how Freud approaches dream interpretation. For Freud, dreams are incredibly personal and dream imagery is built out of the objects and experiences specific to the patient. There may be symbolic resonances, but they can’t be universalized. It is NOT about simple, generic symbolic readings, i.e. “if you dream about fish that means good luck.” Similarly, he avoids trying to read the whole dream as a coherent narrative and finding meaning in that. It’s more productive to take every object, character, event, and impression in a dream separately than to try to make sense of the whole. This involves talking to a patient and getting to know them well enough to tease out the repressed anxieties and desires that may be represented in altered form in their dream. Since we don’t have Sherlock on the couch in front of us, we can’t exactly pick at his brain to find hidden associations. Instead, we have to rely on what we already know of his character from previous episodes and maybe a dash of ACD canon.

Another caveat: Freud specifically talks about fictional dreams and how little they generally resemble real dreams. Fictional dreams usually contain glaringly obvious symbols because they are the creations of conscious minds, not unconscious, repressed ones. In The Abominable Bride we clearly have a fictional dream constructed by a couple of conscious minds: Sherlock’s dream in The Abominable Bride is WAY more coherent and complete than real dreams normally are. (Necessarily so – if the dream had been as bizarre and incoherent as a real dream, it would have been unwatchable as a story.) So we must be careful of getting carried away with our analysis. That said, the fact that the dream includes a direct reference to Freud suggests that writers were expecting and even encouraging a Freudian-style interpretation of their invented dream. We owe it to them to at least give it a shot! '

In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud puts forward the theory that every dream is the expression of an unconscious wish. This is an extension of his theory of the Pleasure Principle, which states that all human action is governed by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In dreams, we can do whatever we want, so naturally we would seek out pleasures unavailable to us in waking life. While in some cases (sex dreams, food dreams), the dreamer’s pleasurable wish may be obvious, in the case of anxiety dreams and nightmares, the wish has been disguised because our conscious minds find it shameful for some reason. For example, if you have a test tomorrow, you might dream that a million little obstacles prevent you from getting to the test. People normally interpret this as anxiety about getting to the test on time, but Freud claims this dream is really the expression of your wish not to take the test at all.

So going by this theory, what might be the wish at the heart of The Abominable Bride? The Abominable Bride contains a nightmare scenario where Sherlock fails to prevent the murder of a client’s husband.

Read simply, this could be an expression of Sherlock’s anxiety over failing at his profession. Read as the fulfillment of a wish, however, we might conclude that Sherlock actually wants Sir Eustace eliminated because he has repressed desires for Eustace’s wife, Lady Carmichael. And (Johnlockers, cover your eyes!) there is plenty of support for this reading in the dream: Sherlock directly accuses Sir Eustace of being unworthy of his wife, John later suggests that Sherlock has taken a fancy to her, and Sherlock himself – despite all his denials – admits that she has “admirably high arches”.

But all of this is still surface interpretation and doesn’t get us close to the deeper levels of the dream. According to Freud, when the mind has something it feels guilty or uncomfortable about, it will go to extraordinary lengths to bury the idea and keep this repressed material from becoming conscious.

Freud gives the example of what he calls “kettle logic”. This comes from a story about a man who is accused by his neighbor of having broken a borrowed kettle. The man replies that

1) the kettle isn’t broken
2) it was already broken when he borrowed it
3) he never borrowed the kettle at all.

Any one of these justifications might make sense, but together they become absurd. This is the way logic works in dreams: these kinds of excessive, overlapping, and contradictory rationalizations are a sign that there is a submerged idea or desire that the dreamer isn’t ready to face yet. We see this “kettle logic” at various points in the The Abominable Bride  dream, but most frequently it occurs whenever the subject of Moriarty comes up.

When Sherlock asks himself, “How could he survive?”, Dream!John immediately replies “She, you mean” – a sign that Sherlock’s mind is trying to paper over the momentary inconsistency and distract Sherlock from the buried content of the dream. And again:

The “miss me” note appears out of nowhere on Sir Eustace’s corpse, and its message bears no relevance to the case at hand.

Then in the Diogenes Club, when Sherlock says, “His body was never recovered”, Dream!Mycroft replies, “To be expected when one pushes a maths professor over a waterfall”, even though that’s not relevant to the modern mystery Sherlock’s actually trying to unravel.

But Sherlock’s dream self participates in this misdirection too. Sherlock says, “He’s trying to distract me, to derail me”, presumably from the “real” case of Mrs Ricoletti. But in fact, Ricoletti doesn’t matter at all. The whole Ricoletti case was only ever intended as a tool to get him closer to Moriarty.

Within the dream, the only one who really gets this game of repression and revelation is Moriarty himself. Sherlock tells Moriarty that he chose to come here, and Moriarty replies, “Not true. You know that’s not true”, suggesting that they both know nothing happens in this dream space without Sherlock wishing for it. Then Moriarty proceeds to lecture Sherlock on what we’ve called “kettle logic”. He points out the logical impossibility of him showing up at the scene of Sir Eustace’s murder. He emphasizes all the points that don’t add up, that don’t make sense. He insistently reminds Sherlock that the whole Ricoletti case is little more than a screen over what really draws Sherlock: Moriarty himself.

But why is Moriarty’s appearance in 221b, in the crypt, and at the waterfall a fulfillment of Sherlock’s unconscious wish?

There are a lot of ways we could take this. The most transparent is that Sherlock needs to solve the mystery of Moriarty’s apparent reappearance, and for that, he needs to consult Moriarty. That makes sense, but it’s a little dull, and it’s not clear why Sherlock’s mind would go to such lengths to disguise this motivation.

The most fannishly appealing explanation is that Sherlock wants Moriarty for ~sex stuff~, but can’t admit it. And hey, let’s not pretend there isn’t a TON of evidence for this reading:

Plus, it would be pretty typical of Freud’s patients to be repressing sexual desires with a very inappropriate person: an arch-enemy, say, or better yet, a corpse. So far, still pretty obvious. But what if we went deeper still… Is there anything else?

Oh, yes. Read more in part 2: The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive.