CHAPTER 30

WHAT THIS MEANT

FOR ALL OF THEIR SELF-EFFACEMENT and understatement, Richard and Marietta do not minimize the importance of their investigation. They wind things up by pointing out that “Freud’s first psychoanalytic publication of a parapraxis and the ‘repressed thoughts’ connected with it contain already the essence of most of his future ideas and discoveries.”

I love their managing to get those “repressed thoughts” in—in quotation marks—one more time. But one can’t be sure whether it is what has been “repressed,” or the “future ideas and discoveries,” that the Karpes have in mind when they immediately follow this sentence with one that begins with the vague antecedent “They.” Here Richard and Marietta offer a grand summation: “They deal with death and sexuality, with demons and the psychopathology of Schizophrenia, with the Oediupus Complex and with his conflict in dealing with anti-Semitism. We might assume that his hero-worship of Hannibal later turned towards the study of Moses and his monumental work Moses and Monotheism.”

In fact, this is their first mention of schizophrenia. (I like the way they give it a capital S, as if it is a religious movement.) Perhaps this is a sequitur to what they have implied about a divided self in Freud; maybe they think it is an element they have already identified in Signorelli’s frescoes. In any case, it is a startling and provocative subject to bring up at this late stage of the game and without further discussion.

THE KARPES’ FINAL ONE-SENTENCE PARAGRAPH is a bit grand, a bit West Hartford Public Library Lecture Program for me. It is “Thus the trip to Central Italy in September 1897, eleven months after his father’s death, was indeed the starting point in Freud’s development as the creator of the new science of psychoanalysis.” How could these brilliant people have started with that most depressing word “Thus,” which, when it begins a sentence, instantly dampens whatever follows it? And, adding insult to injury, inserted that other clunker, “indeed,” into the same sentence? These academic tools of detachment dilute the force of the Karpes’ finale. But well they should. For even if Richard and Marietta were on solid ground in crediting the parapraxis concerning Signorelli’s name with Freud’s keen awareness of the importance of memory loss, to call the trip “the starting point . . . of psychoanalysis” is perhaps overdoing it.

OR SO I THOUGHT. I RECENTLY DISCOVERED, from an obituary of Marietta that appeared in 2009, when she died, at age ninety-seven, that, having been born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. and having studied law in Prague, she worked directly with Sigmund Freud to translate a lot of his work into Czech. She was clearly fluent in German, since it was the language of the autobiographical novel she published at age sixteen, a book with the enticing title The Soul of Andre Garaine. In 1956, she published “The Origins of Peter Pan” in The Psychoanalytic Review. Having lost both of her parents and a lot of her other relatives to the Nazi Holocaust, Marietta knew as much about violence as about the insistent youth of Peter Pan; if I have underestimated her insights and expertise, it is my own shortsightedness. Moreover, the obituary, presumably based on information from her three daughters, describes tennis as one of her “passions.” The image of her possibly returning a serve of Susie’s with a winning cross-court backhand out of reach of my inamorata in her little tennis skirt is my latest imaginary scenario, made all the richer because I remember Susie telling me about playing tennis with Adlai Stevenson on a holiday in Jamaica, which goes to show that the minor things one does easily recall can be just as intriguing as the names one forgets.

WHETHER OR NOT THAT TRIP TO ORVIETO REALLY WAS “the starting point of psychoanalysis”—which I now consider Marietta more qualified to declare than I initially thought, and not only because she was good at tennis—what it shows without question is just how directly and personally Freud reacted to his confrontation with certain artworks. I don’t mean the theory of art, or the significance of iconography; I am not talking about all that has been written about Freud as a collector of antiquities (there are numerous volumes on the subject). I mean, rather, his visceral reactions to paintings—the way that art magnified life for him.

That this was so will be all the more evident in those letters Charlotte gave me that preceded the trip to Orvieto by fourteen years. To his fiancée, the future inventor of psychoanalysis felt free to give splendid voice to the intense emotion he experienced when he was face-to-face with certain examples of great art, principally that of the Italian Renaissance. He did not react in clichés; he knew his own taste. The usual canon of greatness—whereby Raphael was on a pedestal—meant nothing to him. What counted above all for Freud were his own reactions to paintings, which, he unabashedly told his future wife, were personal. Forget the “thus” and “indeed” and all the theories; Freud experienced beautiful art in the gonads and in the heart.