FREUD’S “Dostoevsky and Parricide” was first published in 1928 in a book about The Brothers Karamazov. Freud says Dostoevsky’s “place is not far behind Shakespeare,” and that his “episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.” In his essay on the Russian novelist he admired so deeply, Freud manages, I think, to hit the nail on the head about himself and Signorelli. In so doing, he also homes in on what it is in my own life experience that I identify with aspects of his. For one thing, Freud discusses Dostoevsky’s intense fear of death as a child, and the melancholic states into which he would fall: “We know the meaning and intention of such deathlike attacks. They signify an identification with a dead person, either with someone who is really dead or with someone who is still alive and whom the subject wishes dead. The latter case is the more significant. The attack then has the value of a punishment. One has wished another person dead, and now one is this other person and is dead oneself. At this point psycho-analytical theory brings in the assertion that for a boy this other person is usually his father.”
In the period of mourning when Freud himself was in Orvieto, looking at those images of punishment after life, he would have been subject to many of the same feelings himself.
Freud, discussing Dostoevsky, amplifies; “The two attitudes of mind combine to produce identification with the father; the boy wants to be in his father’s place because he admires him and wants to be like him, and also because he wants to put him out of the way. This whole development now comes up against a powerful obstacle. At a certain moment the child comes to understand that an attempt to remove his father as a rival would be punished by him with castration. So, from fear of castration—that is, in the interests of preserving his masculinity—he gives up his wish to possess his mother and get rid of his father.”
In my own case, I found the perfect substitute for possessing my mother: I would fall in love with her archrival/closest friend, and convince myself it was okay. It was easy, since, to quote a crusty woman who knew Susie, she was “the prettiest thing that ever walked.”
What draws me to Freud, to Signorelli’s frescoes, and to my memories of Susie are the ways that all these people make thoughts that on the one hand seem extreme appear to be very normal. Freud, after saying that a boy “gives up his wish to possess his mother and get rid of his father”—“from fear of castration”—writes “We believe that what we have here been describing are normal processes, the normal fate of the so-called ‘Oedipus complex.’”
On the other hand, I think there was something in Freud himself that was not so rational, and that did not buy the “normal” idea for himself. It caused him to forget the name Signorelli—which on some level was like forgetting his own, Sigmund. This destabilizing element was the homosexual element so blatant in the Orvieto frescoes.
Again, Freud, writing on Dostoevsky, provides crucial insight: “A further complication arises when the constitutional factor we call bisexuality is comparatively strongly developed in a child. For then, under the threat to the boy’s masculinity by castration, his inclination becomes strengthened to diverge in the direction of femininity, to put himself instead in his mother’s place and take over her role as object of his father’s love. But the fear of castration makes this solution impossible as well. The boy understands that he must also submit to castration if he wants to be loved by his father as a woman. Thus both impulses, hatred of the father and being in love with the father, undergo repression.”
There, of course, is the key term: “repression.” It’s the word he always used about the Signorelli parapraxis. The sources for that repression would have been particularly alive to him as he confronted all that male nudity in the period following his father’s death.
In my own spontaneous musing, brought on by my investigation of Freud’s dealing with his father’s death, I reveled in my own father’s admiring my arrogance, like my mother’s, in front of Mr. Weinstein; his encouraging my love of art, which made me like my mother, who was a painter; his being the dark-haired brown-eyed one, while I have my mother’s coloring and blue eyes. The instinct to have your father love you as your mother—yet also as himself (how I am my father’s son! I feel it a hundred times a day, in the voice, the posture, and so many attitudes)—may be hard to accept, but it is also undeniable. And all that complexity of the father-son relationship would have come alive to Freud in front of Signorelli’s art, and again when he was thinking of Turks and their sexuality, and death and of the news he received in Trafoi of his patient’s suicide, and must have been overwhelming to him, as it is to all of us, thus forcing his mental processes to come to a halt, a necessary stop. Even if the result—the forgetting of a name—tortured him, it may have helped calm him down.
Freud did not expect most people to accept these ideas easily. In the Dostoevsky essay, he goes on to say:
I am sorry, though I cannot alter the facts, if this exposition of the attitudes of hatred and love towards the father and their transformations under the influence of the threat of castration seems to readers unfamiliar with psycho-analysis unsavoury and incredible. I should myself expect that it is precisely the castration complex that would be bound to arouse the most general repudiation. But I can only insist that psycho-analytic experience has put these matters in particular beyond the reach of doubt and has taught us to recognize in them the key to every neurosis. This key, then, we must apply to our author’s so-called epilepsy. So alien to our consciousness are the things by which our unconscious mental life is governed!
And of course it was his own “unconscious mental life” that forced him to forget a name.