In the early fifth century, the neo-Platonist Macrobius wrote a commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio. Oddly enough, this commentary wound up taking on a life of its own, and, whereas the Somnium Scipionis survives only in a single palimpsest, the commentary survives in thirty five manuscripts. The commentary is something of a philosophical miscellany, writing about numerology, the solar system, the state of the soul, and of course dreams and their interpretation. In writing of dream interpretation, he wrote that certain dreams had powers of divination, either predicting events that would happen, showing something to the dreamer through a god or dead statesman, or concealing "with strange shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the information being offered, and requires an interpretation for its understanding" (III.10).

This third divinatory dream, the enigmatic dream, contained a truth, but it was a truth covered in an integumentum, a veiling that needed to be interpreted in order for the true meaning to be discovered. Macrobius's writings on dream interpretation fit in with the larger tenor of his commentary, which is strongly based on the neo-Platonic nostrum "Scito te ipsum," "Know yourself." In the neo-Platonic framework, to know onesself meant for one to realize that he was a celestial being, a god imprisoned in the flesh whose true home was the heavens. Knowing yourself in the end yielded a positive result.

Fifteen hundred years later, Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. Reading Freud, we might be stricken to notice that he shares a good deal of similarity with Macrobius. For Freud too tells us that dreams contain a truth that is nonetheless covered in an integumentum that needs to be interpreted, and the interpretation too comes from the principle of "Know thyself."

There, though, the similarity ends. For while Macrobius held that dreams may have divinatory powers, he believed that they came because man was a spiritual creature and during sleep the soul was at its most seperate from the physical body. Freud, of course, was materialist in his outlook and thus told of dreams that told of the dreamer whose integumentum came not from a god, but from the repressive forces of the ego.

The most significant difference, though, is that when the Macrobian dreamer worked to know himself, he did so in order to understand that he was a creature of the heavens who belonged in a starry abode. The Freudian dreamer, though, when knowing himself, usually discovered repression, guilt, fantasies of murder and adultery, and various other unsavory desires. What brought this change?

I have until now neglected to note that Macrobius wrote in what was essentially the last generation in which the intelligentsia of Europe was not wholly Christian. Freud wrote in one of the first generations in fifteen hundred years in which the intelligentsia was no longer Christian. The two, then, can be seen as bookends as it were, bracketing the Christian experience of Western Civilization. St. Paul had written that he looked within himself and found only sin, and this sentiment, this introspection in the search not for neo-Platonic divinity but for the perceived filth of sin characterized a large part of what we know about the way people examined their own consciousnesses.

The attempt to ruthlessly shine a light on the dark and seamy underside of the human consciousness whose contents we may not even fully know is the product of fifteen centuries of Christianity. Much as Siggy himself may have disliked to be told so, the intellectual foundations of the need to look within, to know onesself, and discover the subconscious were laid by people like St. Paul, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Guibert of Nogent.

Addendum: This most is mostly the mental detritus from some papers that I was working on last semester dealing with medieval subjectivity. If you are interested in reading further on this fascinating subject, I would highly recommend the following two books: The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 by Colin Morris and The Invention of Literary Subjectivity by Michel Zink. The former was re-printed in 1987 and the latter has recently been translated.