GIVEN THE IMPORTANCE THE KARPES ASSIGN to the younger Freud’s attitude both toward his father and toward Jewish traditions concerning death rites as essential elements to his forgetting of Signorelli’s name, it is surprising that these scrupulous scholars left out certain details of this missive Freud sent William Fliess from Berggasse 19, his office in Vienna, on November 2, 1896, shortly after Jacob Freud died. Reading that letter in a different English version from the one they used (they probably translated it from the German themselves), I found aditional elements of great note. Freud writes:
Dear Wilhelm,
By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man’s death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light-heartedness he had a significant effect on my life. By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event.
I now feel quite uprooted.
. . . I must tell you about a nice dream I had the night after the funeral. I was in a place where I read a sign:
“You are requested to close the eyes.”
I immediately recognized the location as the barbershop I visit every day. On the day of the funeral I was kept waiting and therefore arrived a little late at the house of mourning. At that time my family was displeased with me because I had arranged for the funeral to be quiet and simple, which they later agreed was quite justified. They were also somewhat offended by my lateness. The sentence on the sign has a double meaning: one should do one’s duty to the dead (an apology as though I had not done it and were in need of leniency), and the actual duty itself. The dream thus stems from the inclination to self-reproach that regularly sets in among the survivors.
Some of what Freud was feeling—the vital factor of “self-reproach,” for example—we already know from Richard and Marietta. But their main goal, I believe, based on what they chose to quote, and then their use of italics for “after” and their addition of “sic,” was to discredit Freud for having made the dream occur before the funeral in Interpretation of Dreams, just as they cast doubt on his veracity with the Lake Trasimene issue. I find this odd.
In many ways, Richard and Marietta subscribe respectfully to the Freudian canon. Why, then, in addition to having us see their master’s refabrication of the sequence of events, do they simultaneously sell him short by leaving certain things out?
Is this not because they are like the son who on the one hand worships his father and on the other hand needs to outdo him?
I, for similar reasons, initially imposed a limitation on my own thinking by treating the Karpes’ article as the gospel, and looking no further.
They were unimpeachable. And how easy it was to feel I had read the last word on a subject and could call it quits with impunity. The conclusiveness was irresistibly satisfying.
Then, in the same pattern as the Karpes, I increasingly saw my seers’ errors. I found their mistakes, and various shortcomings, not because I wanted or needed to debunk Richard and Marietta—I would have loved to continue finding them perfect—but because the faults were real, and to be blind to them would have been stupid.
I keep thinking of Anni Albers’s statement that “Kandinsky often said, ‘There is always an and.’” How true, but at times it is against human nature to seek it out. Resolution has its lure. Fortunately, there are other occasions when the “and” is rich—as with the additional material in Freud’s letter to Fliess.
It was the next generation who forced me to look further. This has often been the case for me. My elder daughter, Lucy, has often insisted that I see certain truths I would otherwise have managed to avoid; her success is in part because of the polite, even charming, way she has led me to do so—far more effective than the screaming that occurs with most firstborn children. It was her sister, Charlotte, who provided me with the entire letter to Fliess, taking me beyond the Karpes’ chosen excerpts, and leading me to the additional detail of the barbershop, which strengthens the evidence that Freud offended his family. My two daughters, in different ways, one general and one quite specific, had opened me up to a whole new territory concerning Freud and his father. Moreover, inspired by both of these young women, so bright in very different ways, so reassuring in their acceptance of uncomfortable truths I instinctively would, as a child, have avoided, I felt pushed to reconsider myself, my own father, and his father.