I HAVE A MENTAL IMAGE OF FREUD looking at the frescoes in the Cappella Nova that is almost as vivid as my vision of the Karpes standing behind my parents’ house as the kettledrums to Susie’s violin. More and more, with age, with the yearning for the time in life when the formative events were actually taking place, I see these pivotal moments, the players at a peak of their powers, life ineffably delicious in its sheer richness. Aliveness! How can it ever end? How can the exquisite interactions disappear the way cremated bodies do when the ashes are scattered at sea? Does writing about them at least preserve them in some form for future generations? It is a feeble attempt, perhaps, but as someone intoxicated by the richness of life, I have to hope as much.
My particular image of Freud comes thanks to Stefan Zweig, who for me, as for many people, is one of those extraordinary writers who brings people and places to life so that we feel we have experienced them firsthand. Zweig knew Freud personally. He wrote a long essay on him that was published in his 1931 book Die Heilung durch den Geist, translated as The Mental Healers, and was dedicated to Albert Einstein, another of his acquaintances. Zweig’s narrative is a trenchant and appreciative overview of the impact of the man whose “voice broke the silence” of the “pusillanimous conspiracy of ‘moral’ silence [that] dominated Europe for a whole century, an interminably long one.”
Zweig sprinkles his text with judiciously selected quotations that in effect summarize, brilliantly, Freud’s achievement, and at the same time evoke the mental state into which Orvieto put him. They also remind us that, even though Freud invented so much, and gave the world what it never had had before, he was dealing with mental processes that go back to the earliest stages of humankind, and had been addressed by many brilliant thinkers who preceded him.
Zweig opens with a brief quotation from Schiller: “Although by the dim light of everyday emotions the secret working of the forces of desire remains hidden away from sight, it becomes all the more conspicuous and stupendous when passion is strongly aroused.” What Zweig uses to elucidate Freud’s achievement for others also applies perfectly to Freud’s own mental events inspired by the Luca Signorelli frescoes.
And then there is the question posited by Nietzsche with which Zweig opens his first chapter: “How much truth can the mind endure, how much can it dare to entertain?” Does this not help us to understand better why Freud could not summon the name Signorelli for those two days when it eluded him? Another chapter opens with a line from Balzac (in this case, Zweig provides the date, which was 1833) that invokes another kernel of Freud’s genius, the reason for which he was the first to acknowledge that his failure to come up with the artist’s name on the journey to Herzegovina said volumes more than if he had remembered it easily: “I have myself had evidence that our latent senses are better than our obvious ones.”
At the same time that Zweig puts Freudian thought in this universal context, he provides a vivid sketch of the individual himself, at least as the inventor of psychoanalysis presented himself to his friends and colleagues. When Zweig got to know Freud, some thirty years after his visit to Orvieto, the father of psychoanalysis was still the epitome of robust health:
Freud’s intellectual profusion has been the expression of a thoroughly healthy constitution. Until he was approaching seventy, this great physician was never seriously ill; this shrewd observer of nervous workings was entirely free from nervous disorder; this clear-sighted student of mental abnormalities, this much-vilified pansexualist, remained almost uncannily hale and single-hearted in the manifestations of his personal life. As far as his own experience is concerned, he has known nothing of the everyday lesser maladies which, for most of us, again and again interfere with the smooth source of thought and action, and he has hardly ever suffered from headache or fatigue. Throughout the greater part of his working life, he found no occasion to consult a colleague, and was never compelled by illness to break an appointment. . . . For him, indeed, health is synonymous with breathing, to be awake means the same thing as to work, creation is identical with life. Moreover, just as he tenses every nerve upon his tasks in his working hours, so does his iron frame enjoy the benefit of perfect relaxation during sleep. A brief period of repose suffices him. When he sleeps he sleeps more soundly, when he wakes he wakes more thoroughly, than most of us.
The hardiness makes me think of Dr. Solnit, who never canceled an appointment because of ill health, and was a model of someone who appeared undisturbed by maladies—which was part of his charm for me. We generally had appointments at 6:30 A.M., and I learned from one of his younger colleagues that he regularly worked until midnight. Of course he would never refer to this, since he told me nothing whatsoever about himself, but his physical robustness in his seventies—his age during my treatment—furthered my sense that he was a sort of god. His need for nothing more than brief periods of sleep was part of his mythic image. It became evident to me in a less desirable manifestation on an occasion when I caught him snoring during one of our sessions, but I still admired his fortitude.
I cannot help reading into Zweig’s statement that Freud had “a health-record worthy of Polycrates.” (Even if we don’t know who Polycrates was, we are convinced that this is terrific, and readily picture the most energetic, illness-free of Greeks.) Zweig implies that it is because of the expansiveness of his mind and the acceptance of his own self that Freud had such a terrific physical constitution. Here I go back to the word pansexualist, which I just love. Naturally, I think of Signorelli’s painting of Pan, beloved to Berenson, even though that mental connection has little to do, at least specifically, with what Zweig had in mind. A pansexualist is someone who is “not limited or inhibited in sexual choice with regard to gender or activity.” That idea was a radical breakthrough in 1931, and I like the link that Zweig suggests between such a lack of censorship, of one’s self or others, and Freud’s remarkable physical well-being.
Having provided this sense of Freud’s open-mindedness, Zweig describes the great doctor’s external appearance. This sketch, while it comes from a later date than the trip to Orvieto, helps us better to conjure Signorelli’s admirer as he walked through the vast space of the cathedral, turned right into the Cappella Nova, and stood transfixed by the remarkable art there:
His bodily aspect conforms to his mental characteristics. Here, too, all the details are harmoniously proportioned. He is neither too tall nor too short, neither too stout nor too thin. His lineaments are, indeed, so average that his face has long been the despair of caricaturists. In that well-shaped oval they can find no feature that lends itself to the pencil’s specious exaggeration. Not even when you compare photographs taken at long intervals, the portraits of the youth with those of the man of middle age, can you detect an outstanding trait, or one of characterological importance. At thirty, at forty, at fifty, he is the same: a good-looking man, virile, one whose aspect is regular to a fault. His dark and searching eyes no doubt suggest the thinker . . . the bearded, strong face of a typical physician . . . somewhat unfathomable, gentle, perhaps over-serious, and nowise bearing witness to powers that have exerted so far-reaching an influence. . . . We must abandon any attempt to find characterological lights in a countenance so unrevealing in its harmony.
So this was the man who wanted to be Hannibal! Modest-sized and pensive, he exerts, in Zweig’s portrait, a quiet force, yet distinctly lacks the bravura little boys want in their warriors. The qualities young Freud put into his toy soldiers, and with which Signorelli endows his fantastic specimens of masculine power, while redolent in Freud’s imagination, were absent in his self.
Zweig’s Freud had, however, a mental virtuosity equal to the physical prowess of Signorelli’s men. Acknowledging his own wish to make Freud appear a bit more easy-going than he was, Zweig later adds:
We would be afraid of telling a lie to such a man, feeling him to be one whose insight would enable him to detect every prevarication and to flash a revealing glare upon any tricks and turns of evasion. A face that oppresses and frightens rather than one that liberates and charms, but none the less transfigured by the intensity of the profound thinker; the face, not of a merely superficial observer, but of one who sees pitilessly into the depths.
This dash of Old Testament grimness, this unconciliatory spirit that speaks so plainly in the fierce eyes of the veteran, must not be ignored, must not be omitted from the picture under stress of a desire to make it pleasing. Had Freud lacked the ruthlessness and decisiveness that are among his most salient characteristics, his achievement would have been devoid of its best and most decisive features. . . . Courteousness, sympathy, and considerateness would have been wholly incompatible with the revolutionary thought-trend of Freud’s creative temperament, his essential mission to make extremes manifest, not to reconcile them. His combativeness and forthrightness have always made him want a for or an against, a plain yes or a plain no, rather than a betwixt and between, or an admission that there is perhaps about as much to be said on one side as the other. . . . He is thus unfailingly autocratic and intransigent; and it is above all when he is at war, fighting alone against a multitude, that there develops the unqualified pugnacity of a nature ready to face overwhelming odds.
No wonder Freud—ruthless, combative, pugnacious—was drawn to the physical manifestation of the qualities that defined his conduct, if not his physical self. He continued Hamilcar’s legacy in the way he fought for his beliefs, even if he was not about to hold Martin over an open fire. He saw the world in Signorelli’s Last Judgment terms: where there was a right and a wrong, a blessed and a damned, and nothing whatsoever that was namby pamby. The frescoes in Orvieto put in front of him, in vivid color, though animated brushstrokes, the physical equivalent of his own mental forcefulness. Freud’s cerebral strength and will to prevail were, in these frescoes, recast in male muscularity.