October, 2016.
CHARLOTTE JUST TOLD ME THAT, IN AN EXCITED MOMENT, Freud had said that we do not desire the people we love, but desire the people we cannot love. I was jumping up and down with thoughts about how this pertains to his response to those frescoes. I asked her to send me the precise quotation. It comes from “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” an essay Freud wrote in 1912. The title alone makes me think of a prissy schoolteacher picking up a possibly contaminated handkerchief with tongs.
I mean, really! He makes it about “they”—as if he does not have any such conflict himself. My daughter, whose mind never stops, loved having it pointed out that Freud ascribed the dichotomy to “the other” but not to himself, while she remembered it as inclusive.
In this text, Freud sums up what he deems a tremendous conflict for his patients: “Where they love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.”
Yet might this compact, brilliant observation about the conflict between our animal instincts and the emotions of our hearts not have been a personal revelation on the part of the doctor so alert to the minds and urges of humanity at large? What did and did not exist in Freud’s feelings for his wife, as opposed to her sister? How charged was he by the sight of all those naked musclemen, the powerful warriors so unlike the father he loved unsatisfactorily?
Beholding paintings, Freud reacted in the gut. He could love, in all ways, the woman who is Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. He could swoon to Titian’s beauty. Is it not quite likely that, standing in the football locker room of the Cappella Nova, Freud experienced a feeling that he could better analyze in others than in himself: desire? And that it put him in such a state of conflict that, a year later, grieving for the father who was not the Hamilcar to the Hannibal Freud idolized and longed to be, this is why he was, although at the prime of his mental powers, totally blocked on the name that had the same first three letters as his own, and the same first six letters that, in the language used by this artist whose identity eluded him, identifies a person as a MAN?