RICHARD AND MARIETTA JUMP from the different ways Jacob and Sigmund Freud handled their confrontations with anti-Semites to a discussion of Sigmund’s organization of his father’s funeral details. (So far, they still have not discussed the actual paintings. Their readers, however, can leaf ahead in the article to some pale reproductions of the Signorellis that, depicting violent combat in the afterlife, suggest this commentary and Freud’s inability to recall the artist’s name will all tie in.) We learn that Sigmund rejected a lot that was traditional. He was determined not to identify himself with anything he associated with weakness, including a compliance with rote Jewish rituals.
Instead of paying what he considered an excessive amount of money for the traditional flowery death announcement in the newspaper, Sigmund opted for a smaller one, its graphic layout unusually direct, the name Jacob Freud in large bold type and the information minimal. Sigmund, who, as the eldest son from his father’s second marriage, bore responsibility for all the details, also planned an atypically simple funeral ritual—in keeping with Jacob’s taste. In 1900, he would write that the night before the funeral he had a dream in which “he saw a printed notice which read ‘You are requested to close the eyes’ and ‘You are requested to close an eye.’” The Karpes go on to quote Freud analyzing his own dream. Freud interpreted the “to close an eye” as an instruction to the family members who “were not sympathetic to such puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced” to go easy—by, in effect, winking, and overlooking the affront to tradition. “To close the eyes” was also a directive for the normal procedure with a dead body.
Then, with the same quiet grace I witnessed as they stood with Susie in the midst of the social swarm, the particular confidence they evinced as the only people not intimidated by the most beautiful as well as the richest person in the crowd, Richard and Marietta quote from a letter Freud wrote Fliess about that dream. (They don’t explain who Fliess was, or even provide his first name, but given the journal for which their article was written, they could safely assume that their readers were specialists who already knew.) While Freud’s published analysis of the “close the eyes” dream, written four years after the fact, in The Interpretation of Dreams, has always been taken to be the last word on the subject, definitive for biographers and other scholars, the Karpes point out a startling discrepancy. They begin by citing the letter to Fliess, written on November 2, 1896. “I must tell you about a very pretty dream I had on the night after (sic) the funeral,” Freud reports. By doing nothing more than italicizing the word after and adding “(sic),” my parents’ friends have made an astonishing statement. It seems that, in one of his most pivotal and influential of all his books, Freud rewrote history. He made a dream he had following his father’s funeral, reflecting many of its details, appear, falsely, to have been prescient. In the book he wrote four years after the fact, he changed the order of events so that his unconscious anticipated significant events which in truth has just occurred.
Whether Freud truly misremembered the sequence, or deliberately restructured it to suit his needs, we assume that the account to Fliess, so close in time to the actual dream and funeral, was the accurate one. The difference between the private telling two weeks after the funeral and dream and the published retelling four years later is the distinction between an honest recapitulation of facts and an act of remaking one’s self as a seer. I picture Richard and Marietta being quite smug about the deceptiveness and character flaws of the man who invented their profession. On the other hand, I suspect that Richard, like me, absolutely loved having Susie wrap him around her little finger, even if Marietta was wise to the goddess’s machinations.
What Freud tells Fliess, in his intense emotional state following his father’s death, also includes the information that “On the day of the funeral I was kept waiting, and therefore arrived at the house of mourning rather late.” We do not learn why he was detained on such an important occasion, but through this and other snippets from his letter to Fliess we sense his general feeling of discomfort, since he also allows, “The dream was thus an outlet for the feeling of self-reproach which a death generally leaves among the survivors.”
The Karpes leave it to the reader to make his own inferences about Freud. But we have no doubt what they saw, and what they have told us in their quiet way. Sigmund Freud confabulated; he also developed, in the four years following his father’s death, a need to edit out “the feeling of self-reproach” he once acknowledged.
ESTABLISHING FREUD’S FEELINGS ABOUT his father’s compliance with the anti-Semitic bully, and depicting Freud’s rebelliousness and temerity concerning the details of Jacob’s funeral, the Karpes have laid the groundwork for Freud’s intense response, just prior to the first anniversary of his father’s death, to the sight of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes. Richard and Marietta again state, significantly, that the “Year of Mourning” was when “the idea of the Oedipus Complex crystallized in Freud’s mind.” In one succinct paragraph, they elucidate that earthshaking development. They quote from a letter Freud wrote Fliess on May 31, 1897: “Hostile impulses against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integral part of the neuroses . . . It seems as though in sons this death wish is directed against their father and in daughters against their mother.” Freud admits to Fliess: “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too.”
From there, the Karpes bring everything to a head about Freud’s experience of the Signorellis: “These were the thoughts and emotions which were guiding Freud when, in September of 1897, eleven months after his father’s death, he started out on a vacation trip to Central Italy.”
DECADES AFTER STANDING THERE AS A GAPING TEENAGER, overwhelmed by the sight of my parents’ beguiling friend as she charmed Richard Karpe and annoyed Marietta, I remain overwhelmed. Susie—lithe and svelte under the formfitting dress with those dancing polka dots—seemed to cast a spell on the Karpes, as she had on me. Something beyond the realm of words, beyond all attempts at rationalization and understanding, was prevailing, and having greater force than logic. Physical beauty and sheer aliveness had unequaled power.
Yet if at age sixteen I was intoxicated by her power, more than half a century later I was floored by theirs. Rereading the Karpes’ amplification of Freud’s complex response to those dynamic paintings, I was staggered by their intellect and depth. I also realized that, unconsciously, even as a teenager, I essentially gravitated to these qualities as much as to a pretty face. In a scholarly article that has, until now, been as much as lost to the world, the Karpes, in a few pages, depict incidents with the intricacy of a late Henry James novel. Their writing voice is as calm and as unusual as their presence was in the midst of the swarm of suburbanites at my parents’ party.
While I thought back then that I was interested mainly in Susie, and saw Richard and Marietta as misfits who mattered mainly as foils to her vitality and sexiness and incredible grace, I now see that I was attracted by their wisdom, their quiet force, their comfort with being different from everyone around them. I adored their authority. Even as a teenager, some side of me admired their oddball appearance—which was such a refreshing reflection of reality, of clarity and sense of purpose and knowledge of things, extraordinary in any society, but particularly in West Hartford, Connecticut, in the early 1960s—and now I respect these people all the more. The Karpes were avuncular; they were smart; they had the capacity to be excited. Richard, facing Susie, also showed a wonderful ability to be immensely entertained and to relish the moment. When I read the Karpes’ insightful biographical sketch of Freud at a pivotal, underexamined moment of his development, I recognized that the magnetic power of the scene in my parents’ backyard was because of the characters I then considered the supporting cast as much as by the person I considered the star.
But the presence of the woman who gave me such a strong sense of myself as a male has played no little part in guiding me to understand the impact of those frescoes on Freud.