All this might seem like an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory, but for one thing. The text is from 1649. It was written by a certain Father Ragueneau in a Jesuit Relation, precisely 250 years before the appearance of the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an event which, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought.
