Dream as Ethical Judgment and Spectral Return: Freud’s “Non Vixit” and Nietzsche’s Shadow

In Chapter 6 of Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought, Ronald Lehrer focuses on a particularly haunting dream Freud recorded in October 1898, shortly after attending the memorial of his deceased colleague, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow. The dream, as transcribed and analyzed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, features a convergence of spectral figures—most notably the ambiguous presence of a friend named “P.” and Wilhelm Fliess—culminating in Freud uttering the Latin phrase Non Vixit (“He did not live”) as the dream figure turns pale, indistinct, and melts away. Lehrer’s reading of this dream opens a powerful theoretical aperture into the entwinement of mourning, guilt, rivalry, and the haunting of unlived life—an aperture that resonates deeply with both Nietzsche’s moral philosophy and Freud’s own evolving theory of the unconscious.

The significance of this dream, both clinically and philosophically, cannot be overstated. Lehrer demonstrates that it not only compresses Freud’s emotional entanglements with Fliess and Fleischl-Marxow but also reveals an unconscious structure of ethical ambiguity—one in which the boundaries between mourning and condemnation collapse. The phrase Non Vixit becomes not merely a factual declaration about the death of a friend, but an ontological judgment: an assertion that someone, perhaps even Freud himself, has failed to live in the fullest sense. Here we find a Nietzschean critique embedded within Freud’s own dream—a symbolic confrontation with the possibility that life has been lived inauthentically, evasively, or without fidelity to the deeper forces of becoming.

Nietzsche’s notion of Amor Fati—the radical affirmation of life as it is, without appeal to consolation or transcendence—offers a philosophical backdrop against which Freud’s dream can be read as a kind of moral failure, an unconscious refusal to affirm the tragic structure of existence. As Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” The dream’s melancholic logic stands in stark contrast. The figure who “did not live” is not merely mourned but dissolved, denied the dignity of a full life—or worse, becomes the object through which Freud displaces his own unresolved guilt and competitive ambivalence.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the dream showcases the operation of condensation, displacement, and afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), as theorized in Freud’s later work. The dream blends multiple real-life figures—Fliess, Fleischl, and perhaps Breuer—into a single composite. This figure becomes both rival and mourner, both spectral return and ethical accusation. As Jean Laplanche emphasizes, Nachträglichkeit is not simply a retroactive assignment of meaning but a structural delay that defines the psychic economy itself (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). Meaning is constituted through deferral, misrecognition, and repetition—conditions that are all present in the dreamwork of Non Vixit.

Moreover, the structure of the dream—the disordered temporality, the layering of the living and the dead, the uncanny appearance of a man who both is and is not present—resonates strongly with Derrida’s notion of spectrality. In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that “a specter is always a revenant,” returning to unsettle the certainties of ontology, temporality, and presence (Derrida, 1994). Freud’s dream captures precisely this haunting return. The spectral figure of P. is not merely a representation of a dead friend, but a remainder of the Real, a symptom of something unassimilated in Freud’s life and work. It is not death that is uncanny here, but the indeterminacy of who lived, who was mourned, and what remains unclaimed.

Slavoj Žižek’s reading of the Freudian symptom as an ethical event is also helpful. In For They Know Not What They Do, Žižek proposes that symptoms are not simply pathological but responses to the unbearable demand of the Real—they are where the subject encounters a truth that cannot be symbolized (Žižek, 1991). The dream of Non Vixit, in this light, is a symptom in the Lacanian sense: it embodies a failed symbolic inscription of guilt and loss. It is not that Freud merely grieves the dead—it is that he is interpellated by a ghostly judgment that perhaps he has failed the dead, or failed himself.

The dream’s final image—P. turning blue, his features dissolving, and Freud watching him melt—functions as a moment of ethical rupture. What dissolves is not simply the figure of the other, but the clarity of Freud’s moral position. Lehrer’s insight is that this dream dramatizes Freud’s ambivalence: toward his rivals, toward his own ambition, and toward the weight of philosophical judgment. The dream becomes a genealogical site, in Nietzsche’s sense, where the history of values—professional, personal, epistemic—is recoded through emotional intensities.

In this regard, Non Vixit is not just a dream about death; it is a critique of life. It stages a collapse between historical time and dream time, between philosophy and symptom, between mourning and aggression. Nietzsche’s presence in Freud’s dream-life, as Lehrer convincingly argues, is not merely thematic but structural. The dream is itself a kind of philosophical unconscious, where Freud’s refusal to publicly acknowledge Nietzsche becomes the very ground on which Nietzsche’s thought returns: as ghost, symptom, and ethical confrontation.

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References
• Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Routledge.
• Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, Vol. 4–5. London: Hogarth Press.
• Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton.
• Lehrer, R. (1995). Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: On the Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning. SUNY Press.
• Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage.
• Nietzsche, F. (1908/1979). Ecce Homo. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin.
• Žižek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Verso.

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