Dreaming up nature

By Oliver Morton

During the Great War a botanist at Cambridge University, Arthur Tansley, had a dream. It was not, as dreams go, a particularly juicy or disturbing one. He was in a South African landscape, an open space abutting scrubland, separated from his friends. A line of "savages" stood by the scrub. They were not a direct threat, but they held spears and shields and formed a barrier that, despite his rifle, Tansley knew he would not be able to overcome. His wife appeared, dressed in white, seemingly oblivious to the shields and spears. Then things got confused. At some point the rifle went off, but Tansley could not, on waking, recall why, or whether anyone was hurt.

What is remarkable about the dream is not its content—Tansley was conflicted between duty to his wife and desire for a forbidden love, with a female student—but its effect. Tansley was fascinated by it and what he thought it said, and that led him to steep himself in Freudian thought. Well known within his profession for his work on the plants of the British countryside, he set about writing an exposition of "The New Psychology" (1920), which became a bestseller. Soon he had moved to Vien­na in order to undergo analysis by Freud himself, who saw his new patient as something of a catch. “It might be a gain to win him over to our science at the loss of botany,” Freud wrote to his acolyte Ernest Jones.