Shane McCorristine - The Spectral Arctic: A History of Ghosts and Dreams in Polar Exploration

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Text Shane McCorristine, 2018

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Shane McCorristine has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

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McCorristine, S. 2018. The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352452

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352452

Introduction

Arctic dreams

In 1893, while frozen in the Arctic ice aboard his expedition ship the Fram, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen reflected on the environment around him:

Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland painted in the imaginations most delicate tints; it is colour etherealised. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one shade ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms it is all faint, dreamy colour music, a far-away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings (Nansen, 1897).

In popular myth Nansen is the archetypal Scandinavian polar explorer a manly, no-nonsense hero with little time for the sentimentality or plodding amateurism of his British contemporaries. However, Nansens account of this expedition, Farthest North (1897), reveals someone with a deeply romantic outlook whose musings on the Arctic dreamland have much in common with the thoughts and ruminations of other nineteenth-century polar explorers. Nansens was a book, moreover, that did not just appeal to other explorers, for it was massively popular too, selling some 40,000 copies shortly after its publication in English (Huntford, 1997, 442).

Some years later in a busy household in Vienna, the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud read the German translation of Farthest North after noting that his family were hero-worshipping Nansen: Martha [Freuds wife] because the Scandinavians obviously fulfil a youthful ideal of hers, which she has not realized in life, and Mathilde [Freuds daughter] because she is transferring her allegiance from the Greek heroes she has hitherto been so full of to the Vikings. Freud was in the midst of writing The Interpretation of Dreams when he read Nansen, and had recently begun an intense period of self-analysis. It was in this context that he thought he could make use of the practically transparent polar dreams that Nansen wrote down (qtd. in Lehmann, 1966, 388).

Although they never met, Freud and Nansen shared more than an appreciation for dreams. Like Freud, Nansen was an early investigator in neuroanatomy and in his doctoral dissertation on the central nervous system defended in 1888 Nansen cited and challenged some of Freuds ideas. While Nansen soon after launched a successful expedition to cross Greenland on skis, Freud was forced to shelve his neuroscientific research and earn a living as a specialist in private practice. As a psychologist he was fascinated by the motivations of polar explorers and was impressed by their heroic feats; but in the case of Nansen a rival neuroanatomist who became internationally famous only a few months after graduating his feelings were notably ambivalent (Anthi, 2016).

After reading Farthest North Freud described Nansens mental state as typical of someone who is trying to do something new which makes calls on his confidence and probably discovers something new by a false route and finds that it is not so big as he expected (qtd. in Lehmann, 1966, 388). On a conscious level Freud identified with the polar explorer as a fellow pioneer and intellectual adventurer someone whose theories about reaching the North Pole by drifting with the Arctic ice had been originally dismissed by incredulous scientific authorities in Britain. On an unconscious level, however, Freud conflated his own doubts about discovering something new with Nansens daring voyage into the unknown. In a materialisation of these feelings, Freud himself dreamt of being in a field of ice with Nansen and giving the gallant explorer galvanic treatment for an attack of sciatica from which he was suffering. During this self-analysis Freud realised he had recovered a childhood memory of confusing