A Chronic Nightmare: Dream Interpretation as the “Royal Road” to Understanding the Trauma of the Nameless Narrator of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899 and revised over time, introduced the psychoanalyst’s theory of the unconscious mind as it relates to dreams. In the text, Freud theorizes that all dreams are a form of wish fulfillment.¹ Nightmares, which he calls “anxiety dreams,” are compatible with this theory, as they represent repressed or unconscious desires— such as the desire for guilt, the death of relatives, humiliation and punishment, and more generally to “appear in the wrong.”² After the original publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, however, Freud revised this theory with respect to one specific type of dream: the chronic nightmare resulting from trauma.³ Such nightmares, he believes, are a symptom of repetitive compulsion, or the compulsion to repeat in order to deal with the psychic force of a traumatic event.⁴ These nightmares result from traumatic situations with which the individual cannot adequately cope; instead of functioning exclusively as wish fulfillment, these dreams are the unconscious mind’s attempt to restore control over the overwhelming psychic energy created by a traumatic event.⁵ The unconscious mind forms, retroactively, a sense of fear or apprehension around the memories of the event, the omission of such sense at the time of the event being the cause of the overwhelming traumatic impact in the first place.⁶ As such, chronic nightmares are the mind attempting, but failing, to reduce the force of the trauma.⁷

In literary criticism, psychoanalysis is most often used to trace evidence of the unconscious desires and anxieties of the text’s author (by assuming the fictional characters are psychological projections of the author), or as a way to explore the “unconscious reserve for real-time historical scripts” or the “political unconscious” (assuming the “socio-ideological condition” of a text is equivalent to the manifest content of a dream, hidden through displacement and concealment).⁸ Indeed, there is often resistance to psychoanalyzing fictional characters, the primary argument being that it removes the characters from the work and attempts to analyze them in their own right.⁹ In Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict, however, Bernard Paris argues in support of analyzing the psychology of literary characters by distinguishing between “stock” characters, those understood only in terms of their function within the text, and “mimetic” characters, those that not only function within the structure of the text but are also endowed with lifelike details, including their own inner logic.¹⁰ As such, a psychoanalytic approach to mimetic characters may increase our understanding of literature by “giving a fuller grasp of the human experience it provides.”¹¹

This article argues that Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman benefits from the application of psychoanalysis to its narrator in order to understand the text as a representation of the unconscious mind dealing with trauma. The text explores the power of the unconscious mind and trauma through the use of a distorted, dreamlike world and the literary device of hallucination. Such exploration, however, does not seek to offer straightforward answers: there is very little overt evidence of trauma, the first-person narrator often refusing to provide introspection or details about his life. Rather, the text requires the reader to perform a sort of Freudian dream analysis to decode the manifest content of the text (i.e., the distorted images and hallucinatory sequences) to unlock latent meaning (i.e., the hidden or obscured meaning residing in the unconscious mind) that suggests the narrator suffers overwhelming anxiety and neurosis resulting from traumatic events—a gruesome injury abroad and a murder he committed. The textual dream world, thus, can be interpreted as the narrator’s unconscious mind attempting, but failing, to rid itself of the psychic disturbance caused by trauma. Moreover, the text, which relies on intentional omissions and a dreamlike plot, can be read as a trauma narrative that does not simply present the symptoms of trauma but rather “performs” the aftereffect of a traumatic experience...