THE KARPES START THEIR ARTICLE “The Significance of Freud’s Trip to Orvieto” with the death of Jacob Freud, the psychoanalyst’s father, in 1896. Sigmund Freud was then forty, his father eighty-one. Freud would later write that the event was central to “my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.” During the following year, the traditional Jewish period of mourning, Freud not only began his self-analysis but also advanced his theories about the Oedipus complex and the origins of hysteria. Richard and Marietta set us up to see that, when Freud went to Orvieto, in spite of his disdain for Jewish rituals, he was keenly aware that the customary period of grieving was about to end. This concurred with his increasing preoccupation with an idea in which the relationship with the same-sex parent—and its intrinsic mix of attachment, competition, and rejection—determines so much in a person’s behavior and desires.
Richard and Marietta elucidate a fundamental difference between Jacob and Sigmund Freud through confrontations each had with anti-Semitism. In 1900, near the start of his self-analysis, Freud would lament “the humiliation he felt when his father admitted that he was once forced off the sidewalk by an antisemitic bully who had tossed his father’s cap into the gutter. ‘What did you do?’ the boy Sigmund asked. ‘I picked up my cap,’ his father answered calmly.” Sigmund’s son Martin Freud would describe a very different experience of his father. The Karpes report that when Sigmund and Martha Freud and their young children were on a summer holiday on the lake of Thunsee in Bavaria, some thugs, brandishing sticks and umbrellas, shouted anti-Semitic remarks at the psychoanalyst. He immediately approached the ruffians and forced them to stop taunting him and to disperse. As they went off sheepishly in different directions, he walked proudly through their midst.
BECAUSE RICHARD WAS A PSYCHOANALYST, and because Marietta, even if she had lesser credentials, seemed like one, and because I grew up in a world where mental health doctors were the closest things to gods, their authority beyond reproach, I accepted that they had good reasons for tendering this information as relevant to Freud’s parapraxis. Besides, the stories fascinated me. How Jews deal with anti-Semitism in predominantly non-Jewish milieus is a subject that has always been a red flag for me. Even before the Karpes offered any explanation for discussing these incidents in relation to Freud’s forgetting the name of Luca Signorelli, my mind was off and running. Did the Karpes discern that the beautiful Susie (it always struck me as significant that her first name began with the S of Semite), for all the assimilation she had achieved as if by a military campaign—she and her husband, a Joshua whose friends called him “Jinx,” were the first Jewish members of Weeburn County Club, a WASP bastion in Darien—would never have picked up her cap meekly? The woman who looked like a Protestant Cleopatra would not just have scattered the crowd, but would have made her assailants cower.
Susie had attended a boarding school in the era when there was a 10 percent quota for Jewish students. She had been captain of the tennis team. The coach had told her not to play in a match at a club near Boston that “restricted” not just its membership but its guests. The alluring brunette with the Ashkenazi last name insisted on participating anyway. She was so triumphant with her cross-court forehands and steely net game that her blond and blue-eyed opponents and teammates acquired new respects for the people they called “juze.”
It was muttered that, especially since Susie’s married name, Flinck, was far less of a giveaway than had been her maiden name, she was horrified when her daughter Barbara, on entering Wellesley College, not only changed it to Foote but had people start calling her “Babs.” Susie was a snob, but she was too self-assured to dissemble.
Or did Richard and Marietta have any idea that their host that evening when they stood in the garden in 1964 had, as an army private, having just started basic training in the throes of World War II, responded to an anti-Semitic slur with a right hook and a left jab? Aside from the ID tags that gave his religion, my father’s name, Saul, was like a badge; of course it made no difference that he had rejected what he considered to be the superstitious practices of his parents. Dad rarely told stories about himself. The tale of his and the offender’s needing to be held back by other soldiers in the barracks was one of the few. My only problem with it is that his yearning to be respected for his boldness was too transparent. Martin Freud was proud over his father vanquishing the anti-Semites, because he witnessed it firsthand, not because his father had made it part of his own legacy.
The Karpes would make Sigmund Freud’s feelings about his father, and the humiliation he felt over what he saw as Jacob’s cowardice before the anti-Semites, the primary reason for Freud’s forgetting the name of the man who painted the Orvieto frescoes.
I WENT TO ORVIETO A SECOND TIME TO STUDY the Signorellis more carefully and better understand their impact on Freud. The grueling images of man-to-man combat do indeed connect to how one stands up to aggression, or else cowers.
To me—as to most male viewers, I think—the presentation of all those naked men possessed by brute force makes one measure one’s own strength. And most of us, when considering what sort of man we are—both our physiques and our toughness or lack thereof—compare ourselves to our fathers, whether we feel we resemble them or have chosen to be different from them.
These remarkable frescoes confront us by rendering manly attributes in close proximity. Both male and female viewers—each for his or her personal relationship to idealized, robust male bodies achieving physical dominance or succumbing to it—respond viscerally to them. Some of these guys have panache, while others seem cruel, but most of them are mightily strong.
Among the first to feel the impact of Signorelli was Michelangelo. He might never have made his erotically laden sculptures of male slaves with muscular torsos were it not for the liberating effect of Signorelli, who also worked on the Sistine Chapel and was a generation older. But one does not have to be Michelangelo to respond to Signorelli’s work; it suffices simply to have a body of one’s own. The Orvieto paintings, executed with spectacular effectiveness and illustrating provocative subject matter, have the power not only to rivet the attentive viewer but to destabilize him.
Without yet knowing the extent of the psychoanalytic literature that finds other, more obtuse reasons for Freud’s parapraxis, when I faced the frescoes themselves, it seemed readily apparent that Freud, because of his issues concerning his maleness, exacerbated by his father’s death, not only could have been made to forget an artist’s name that should have come to him easily but was so undone by the naked men that he had to put a halt to his investigation of his response. Hats off to Richard and Marietta Karpe for acknowledging that the master of their profession was flummoxed to the extent that he could not comprehend his own mind! This is what provocative sights—a fresco cycle, a woman in a blue polka dot dress—can do.
READING THE KARPES ABOUT THE FATHERS AND SONS in the Freud family, most of us make comparisons to our own parent-child relationships. I feel somewhere in the middle between Sigmund and Martin in regard to how I see my father. While, compared to Jacob, Saul was satisfyingly assertive, compared to Sigmund, my father was, for me, not as quietly effective. He was always a little too proud of his rage and the resultant excitement when his fellow soldiers had to stop the fight by pulling him and the anti-Semite apart. It seemed like self-mythologizing on Dad’s part; if I had, just once, seen my father stand up to my mother without ultimately caving in, I would have been more impressed with his account of his own forcefulness. For that matter, I always felt that I could get my way with him, something about which I have mixed feelings to this day. While I adored his kindness and rationality, I craved the crude force of Signorelli’s warriors.
The Karpes, I would discover, pussyfooted on the issue of how Sigmund Freud dealt with anti-Semitism. His ambivalence about being Jewish resulted on other occasions in his being something less than the noble soul who, in front of his children on holiday at the lake of Thunsee, made the thugs disperse.
When I read their article, I immediately felt guilty over an event in my own youth when I failed to stand up as a Jew. Had I known that Freud, like me, had not always been as forthright as when he intimidated those anti-Semites, I would have been comforted. You might say it makes no difference, but I am one of those people for whom Freud and other psychoanalysts as well (Richard Karpe and my own doctor among them) are hero figures (I spent half of my own seven-year-long psychoanalysis working on this issue), and therefore their behavior becomes a standard for me. Before I learned more about him and still saw Freud only as the man depicted by the Karpes as outdistancing his father by confronting the ruffians with their sticks and umbrellas, I considered myself to have acted shabbily at a crucial moment when I was fifteen years old.
At the time, I was a day student at Loomis, a private all-boys school where some two-thirds of the pupils were boarders. I did not realize that there was an unwritten Jewish quota, based on the model of Yale and Harvard, whereby the number of Jews was confined to 10 percent—the same rule that had applied at Susie’s school a generation earlier. Every day, before lunch, the headmaster would end grace by saying “in Christ’s name we ask it,” and I always nodded my head in agreement; in chapel, we sang Christian hymns and read from the New Testament. Now that I think back on those years in the early sixties, I am aware that I went along with this without even questioning it. But there was a lot I did not even think about—such as why there was only one black student in a population of about 450 during my freshman year (although there were a few more by the time I was a senior).
The incident about which I felt ashamed when I learned about Freud dispersing the anti-Semites occurred when I went with a Protestant schoolmate, Allen Minor, and his father, Charles, on a trip to Nassau, in the Bahamas. One day, Charles and Allen’s uncle (Charles’s sister’s husband) and a third friend of theirs took us out on a boat to go deep-sea fishing. Toward late afternoon, at a point when the combination of intense sunshine and a choppy sea had me feeling almost hallucinatory, Allen’s uncle turned to the other two men and, in a loud voice, began to describe a sailboat charter he was trying to organize. He explained that the skipper had named a price. “But then I JEWED him down,” the uncle boasted.
It was not merely that he used Jew as a verb. He emphasized it, evincing great delight in having succeeded at the act of Jewing.
Charles Minor turned an even deeper red than he already was, and began to clear his throat conspicuously while pointing toward me in a way I was not supposed to see.
The uncle did not notice. “What a success!” he continued. “I was able to Jew him down to nearly a half of what he had initially asked.” He was beaming with joy.
Now Charles Minor looked as if he were going to jump off the boat. Meanwhile, Allen and I simply smiled at each other, trying to hold back our laughter at the awkward situation.
I have always tried to think of the incident as funny. But I now wish I had said something—politely. Even if the Karpes had not yet explained what the specific element in Signorelli paintings was that made Freud consider how one reacted to anti-Semitic taunts, and even though Allen’s uncle had not deliberately offended me, why had I not asked something like “And do you think, sir, that people like me are always angling for a lower price?” or “May I invite you to Rosh Hashanah, sir, so that you can celebrate the new year with others who have your skill at bargaining?”