OF ALL PEOPLE, THE SVENGALI OF MY WIFE’S FAMILY, the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, took up the matter of Freud’s memory loss relating to his trip to Orvieto. In 1962, Zilly (Great-Aunt Bettina, who was his analytic trainee, liked to say “Zilly was silly”) wrote:
Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, reports how he remembers relating to a fellow train passenger his profound impression of the frescoes in the Duomo of Orvieto. To his amazement, Freud was unable to tell at the moment either the subject matter of the frescoes or the name of the artist. By way of a series of free associations, he finally recalled the name of the master painter, Signorelli. By way of careful self-analysis, he concluded that he had repressed the name because of its first half, Signor, to which he arrived via a number of associations, one of them being the German word Herr.
It was a remarkable piece of self-analysis on the part of Freud. Yet what appears not less remarkable is that that piece of psychoanalysis done in 1898, . . . lacked the recognition of what now appears so obvious: Signor is the Italian equivalent of Lord in Church language, as is the German word Herr. Freud saw mainly the formal connections in his associations; he failed to see some of the deeper content of the repressed. It is, for instance, of particular interest that the subject matter of Signorelli’s frescoes in the Orvieto Duomo is The Last Judgment.
First of all, Zilboorg has his facts wrong. Freud in fact could see the frescoes, clearly, in his mind’s eye until he remembered the name; the idea that he was “unable” to remember the subject matter is a fallacy that reverses one of Freud’s main objects of fascination. As for the rest of Zilboorg’s theory: maybe, maybe not, but why didn’t he look at the paintings?
It infuriates me to think of Zilboorg—who “treated” both of Katharine’s grandparents and her grandmother’s lover (George Gershwin)—sitting in an office somewhere, his life funded by his victims, playing with words and texts, and then feeling good about himself for his “Lord” observation. How smug and delighted he must have been!
Having known several wonderful people, relatives through marriage, who told me he did palpable damage to them or people close to them, I detest his sense of his own supreme knowledge and the air of superiority with which he declared “he failed to see some of the deeper content of the repressed.”
How did Zilboorg know? Maybe Freud did see that “deeper content” and was just being discreet.
Of course I bear a grudge against Zilboorg. He treated my great friend Eddie Warburg—Katharine’s grandfather’s first cousin—four days a week for twenty-six years. When I knew Eddie, then in his seventies, the poor guy was obsessed and tormented with the issue of homosexuality. I knew from Philip Johnson that Eddie practically perished out of love for the captain of the soccer team at Middlesex, a private all-boys boarding school, which, like Katharine’s grandfather, he attended because it was, back then, one of the few such places where Jews, at least a handful of the right type, were welcome. With me, Eddie talked endlessly about his conquest of a female cousin, and his fondness for certain female dancers when he and Lincoln Kirstein started the future New York City Ballet; he was the original “Thou Dost Protest Too Much.” Yet Eddie knew how he was regarded: Katharine’s grandmother quoted him as saying, once while they were watching a parade together, that when he marched into a room everyone sang “Here comes the fag” instead of “Here comes the flag.” Couldn’t Zilboorg have helped him to accept himself?
Why didn’t Zilboorg get off his high horse and go to Orvieto? The paintings make it all perfectly clear. Maleness, homoeroticism: These are the issues. Firm buttocks and washboard abdominal muscles and hard, broad chests. How dare these pompous people who alter other human being’s lives sit there and keep their silence and then write their knowing papers? Zilboorg being superior to Freud! What he was represssing may have been evident to him on some level. We do not know the insides of other peoples minds, even if we know what they say. And the issue was in all likelihood nothing unusual at all, just a subtle homoeroticism, the same force Freud acknowledged in his boyhood crushes on swashbuckling warriors, his openness about Hannibal. The world is full of intellectuals who dream of being football players. If Zilboorg had only looked at the paintings instead of sitting in his expensive apartment surrounded by the luxuries his patients had paid for, he might have faced the truth, too.