JUST BEFORE FREUD DESCRIBED AND ENVISIONED the Orvieto frescoes, and then found himself unable to name their artist, he and his traveling companion had been talking about the Turks who lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In recalling this, Freud observes “that the Turks show great confidence in their physician and great resignation to fate.” Freud quotes himself saying that if a patient died, his family members would, afterward, assure the doctor: “Sir, if he could have been saved, I know you would have saved him.” The Karpes also inform us that in his account of the journey and the conversation, Freud allows that not only was he thinking about death and the role of doctors in helping prevent it but was also mulling over other matters he did not discuss. Freud writes, “These Turks place a higher value on sexual enjoyment than on anything else and in the event of a sexual disorder they are plunged into a dispair [sic] which contrasts strangely with their resignation toward the threat of death.”
The Karpes emphasize that, just before his upsetting inability to remember the name Luca Signorelli, the psychoanalyst was mulling over the Turkish view that impotence is worse than dying. They cite Freud quoting the Turkish patient of a colleague claiming “Sir, if that does not go any longer, then life has no value.” In the flow of thoughts in Freud’s mind while he was visualizing the paintings in Orvieto but failing to conjure the name of the man who made them, Freud went from observing the Turks’ priority on sexual pleasure to the belief that if one is impotent, then one might as well be dead.
Given the provocative nature of that conversation, there is a lot in the Karpes’ story that begs questions. We learn that Freud could not recall the name Signorelli “for several days until someone told him”; we are left wondering who the knowledgeable informant was. But what frustrated me even more when I read their text is that the Karpes say that the person with whom Freud discussed the Turkish attitude toward sexual potency, in the course of a train journey, was an unidentified stranger. Who could such a person have been? Did Freud often discuss issues about the power of doctors and then discuss erections with people he had never before met?
Freud, according to the Karpes, was on a trip with his wife, Martha; she had, however, become ill, and he was now on his way to Bosnia and Herzegovina on his own. Richard and Marietta fail to tell us, however, where he had left Martha, or under whose care; nor do they say why he elected to continue the journey solo. Perhaps they simply did not know. Maybe this is just another instance of what for a biographer, as well as for an analysand, is one of the most frustrating things in the world: that so much information has been lost to history and can never be recovered.
The Karpes cite Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, written in 1901, as the source of their information about the train, Martha’s illness, and the stranger. In my naïve analysand’s way, comparable to that of a devout practitioner of Catholicism accepting the priest’s words as the gospel truth, it did not initially occur to me that I should consult the Karpes’ source and read Freud’s actual text in its entirety. It would only be very late in the game that I would read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. There, Freud makes no reference to Martha’s having been ill, and while he does say he was talking with a stranger en route to a station in Herzegovina, his reference to having “journeyed by carriage” suggest a horse-drawn carriage more than a train carriage. This seems likely, since in the essay Freud wrote in 1898, within a week of the event in question, and which I only discovered long after reading the Karpes’ article (in which this earlier text is never mentioned), Freud says he was on “a carriage drive”—which hardly sounds as if it could have been on a train. Given, among other things, the enormous symbolism of trains in Freudian thought, the difference is significant.
Richard and Marietta next inform us that, on this same occasion when he was unable to conjure the artist’s name, Freud “also suppressed another thought, a piece of tragic news which had reached him several weeks earlier in Trafoi, a village in the Tyrol. He learned that a patient of his had committed suicide. He states in his analysis of the parapraxis that the suppression of thoughts of death and sexuality was responsible for his forgetting the name Signorelli.”
What? Why? How was the suicide connected with sexuality? The Karpes have allowed that erections were an issue on Freud’s mind, with his reflections on Turkish attitudes toward their importance, and they have made this titillating reference to “thoughts of . . . sexuality,” but then they put the brakes on. Having asked if we can go further, will they do so?