Freud’s Mushrooms
In letters throughout his life, Freud describes seeking the “solitude of the forest” (waldeinsamkeit), the forest as sanctuary. The aloneness of the forest is a vibe that spacewhy is familiar with.
But Freud would also take his children into the forest to go foraging for mushrooms. He had a special mushroom hat that he would wear while they spread out in the brambles looking for the edible steinpilz, or boletus edulis in particular. Once they had found a mushroom Freud had a ritual where he would place his special hat over the mushroom, and blowing a silver whistle to alert the children he would wait until they had all gathered around and he would reveal the mushroom and they would attempt to identify it.
No doubt these sylvan explorations inspired one of the more profound images in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), that of the dream’s navel: that part of the dream that remains obscure and unknowable, eluding all interpretation. “This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.” We have two peculiar images here: the navel/belly-button—that organic cord that binds us to mother (Das Ding); and the mushroom dream-wish growing up out of its mycelium body, hidden underground in the cryptic earth.
Later on, in the Theme of the Three Caskets (1912) Freud speaks of death as the return of the mother, a “woman who destroys him,” and who is “the Mother Earth who receives him once more.”
Reading all of this from the standpoint of mycelium teleology, we may follow Freud’s invitation and, bringing his metaphors to ground, find a path that leads from the forest down into the underworld. We will propose that the dream’s navel follows mycelium into the literal realm of the dead. The very bottom of dream—the metabolic base of all psyche—lives in the body of the earth.
