I AM PUZZLED THAT THE KARPES DID NOT QUOTE MORE directly from the letter Freud wrote Fliess on September 22, 1898, in which he discusses his inability to recall the name of the artist of the Orvieto frescoes. It was only at the very end of my explorations that I had (again thanks to Charlotte) the actual letter in front of me; it changes my slant, if only slightly, on what Luca Signorelli’s work was all about for Freud.
For one thing, he begins that letter by saying that, while he has “been back barely three days” after the trip during which he incurred the memory loss, “all the bad humor of Vienna has already descended upon me. It is sheer misery to live here.”
I think it adds to our understanding of Freud’s issues concerning Signorelli’s chapel if we consider the full context in which Freud presents the incident that occurred “during a short trip to Herzegovina, which I made from Ragusa.” (That description leaves open the issue of whether the carriage was one on a train or one drawn by horses.) By reliving the memory loss, he was returning, mentally, to thoughts of travel to a fascinating part of the world, a lot that he preferred to Vienna: the thrill of Italian Renaissance painting, Turkish sexuality, and the behavior of the human mind—in this case his own, with all its puzzles. All this excitement was in marked contrast to his current gloom. Additionally, Freud brings up his memory loss just after telling Wilhelm Fliess his thoughts about their relationship.
Fliess, a Berlin otorhinolaryngologist, was two years older than Freud. Although he was a couple of inches taller, in photos of these two men with their full but neatly trimmed beards and mustaches and correct dark suits, they look almost like twins. They met in 1887, after Fliess heard Freud speak in Vienna. Their exchange was a rich one; they were mutually supportive friends as well as intellectual colleagues who batted ideas back and forth with profound attentiveness to each other’s views.
Fliess had developed a theory of “reflex nasal neuroses” that included a consideration of bisexuality and proposed that pathological processes develop in a cyclical way, over a period of twenty-eight days in women and twenty-three in men. While he did not agree with everything posited by his colleague and friend, Freud was particularly interested in Fliess’s concept of bisexuality, which would figure in his own writing on sexuality as he formulated his theories on the subject after the turn of the century. He also credited Fliess with having called his attention to the importance both of jokes and all popular fantasies.
In that letter written just after his unhappy return to Vienna, once he has described his miserable mood, Freud declares his terrific respect for Fliess, and his longing to have his friend challenge his own views: “I wish you thought less of my masterly skills and I had you close by so that I could hear your criticisms more often. I am not at all in disagreement with you, not at all inclined to leave the psychology hanging in the air without an organic basis.” In light of all the current thinking about wiring and chemistry as central sources of the variables of human mental health, this statement from the young Freud is crucial. It also may further illuminate the reason he could not conjure the name.
Just before explaining what happened on the journey into Herzegovina, Freud allows, his despair evident, that the reason he has been unable to connect the organic and the psychological “I have not even begun to fathom.” It is then that we get to the moment that prompted him to examine the components of Signorelli’s name.
Freud begins, “I could not find the name of the renowned painter who did the Last Judgment in Orvieto, the greatest I have seen so far.”
Freud continues by saying that he briefly considered Botticelli, and then Boltraffio, as the name of the painter, but that he quickly knew these were not correct; here the Karpes represent Freud’s experience exactly as he did.
But then Freud says something to Fliess that I find extremely provocative and demanding of a bit of exegesis, yet which the Karpes leave out. He writes, “At last I found out the name, Signorelli, and immediately knew, on my own, the first name, Luca—as proof that it had been only a repression and not a genuine forgetting.”
The way that instant knowledge of the name Luca established the distinction between repression and forgetting is a superb example of Freud’s brilliance and originality. So is Freud’s continued amplification to Fliess on components of the name in question:
It is clear why Botti-celli had moved into the foreground; only Signor was repressed; the Bo in both substitute names is explained by the memory responsible for the repression; it concerned something that happened in Bosnia and began with the word, Herr [Signor, Sir], what can be done about it? I lost the name Signorelli during a short trip to Herzegovina, which I made from Ragusa with a lawyer from Berlin (Freyhau) with whom I got to talking about pictures. In the conversation, which aroused memories that evidently caused the repression, we talked about death and sexuality. The word Trafio is no doubt an echo of Trafoi, which I saw on the first trip! How can I make this credible to anyone?
Wow! First of all, this is contrary to what the Karpes write about the person Freud encountered on the train having been a stranger. It changes things to learn that he had not struck up this unusually profound conversation with someone whose name he did not know, but that he was with this acquaintance he identifies to Fliess as a lawyer with the name of Freyhau.
Chastising Richard and Marietta for this omission, I imagine them just smiling at me knowingly, as they smiled at Susie, and making me wonder about why I felt impelled to correct them, and why I insist on being a detective. I can picture them asking what my issue is. In a similar vein, I well remember that day I heard Dr. Solnit snoring. I broke the rules of psychoanalysis by turning around to look at him, and then politely woke him from his sleep. Quickly, the issue switched from the problem that my psychoanalyst was sleeping on the job to how I felt about it. Did I think that my parents slept through anything they did not want to hear from me? Why did I consider Dr. Solnit so godlike that I became convinced he could hear me even while he snored? Then, a moment later, why did I believe that my own thoughts were so significant that it mattered if he slept?
And now some six months after writing the paragraph above, I note that I have used the word omission. It should have been error. But I was initially unable to question the Karpes’ authority to that degree.
What would Susie have thought if she knew that the Karpes made mistakes? I started this exploration of Freud’s trip to Orvieto with the notion that their article about it was flawless. Now I am wondering if they read only excerpts from Freud’s letter to Fliess, and whether they did not in fact see the entire text. Here, too, were the limitations of the West Hartford Library decisive?
The detailed analysis of the names, which Richard and Marietta also leave out, is instructive. Trafoi is a mountain resort in northern Italy, known mainly as a holiday destination for noble families from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. I cannot help wondering if Freud was in his way trying to avoid the main point with his buddy Fliess by just associating from name to name. Why would Freud’s memory of a trip to the mountains have affected his choice of an artist’s name? To go from Botticelli and Boltraffio to Bosnia because they start with the same two letters also seems like a way of avoiding the point. On the other hand, when Dr. Solnit once pointed out to me that I said the three syllables of my closest male friend’s name, Nick Ohly, in such a way that they had the same rhythm as my grandmother’s name, Rosalie—which my doctor pronounced, as if echoing me, as Rose-ah-lee—and practically rhymed with it, I considered it a complete breakthrough, a valuable observation in my attempt at self-understanding. The dissection of words can prove far more fruitful than the dissection of eels.
My own view on the reason that Freud came up with two names that start with Bo rather than the correct one, which begins with Sig, is that Bo sounds like beau—the masculine form of the French adjective for “beauty.” The names of the two incorrect artists thus conjure the quality of the males in those frescoes that Freud felt was lacking when the Sig of Sigmund was involved.
This fits with Freud’s admission in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that what prompted the name confabulation when he envisioned the Orvieto frescoes were his “repressed thoughts.” In the conclusion of his letter to Fliess, he complains of his solitude at home and the possibility that he might go to Berlin because another colleague wants him to consult on a difficult case; such a trip would allow him to visit Fliess. To me, that loneliness and the yearning for the company of a male friend he admired is central to the impact of those fantastic frescoes of naked men in central Italy.
In that same letter, Freud himself admits, “I must not provoke gods and men by further travels, but instead wait here patiently for the little sheep to gather.” Maybe this is tongue and cheek, but he was saying it to the colleague who believed that every joke and quip had its rich meaning. The idea of gods, of men who could be provoked, of people as docile as sheep, and the implicit notion of others as wolves—all this was what came to mind just after he had recounted the experience of being unable to recall the name of the painter of those strapping brutes in the Cappella Nova.
I ALSO WISH THE KARPES HAD INCLUDED THE FOLLOWING from that pivotal letter Freud wrote Fliess on November 2, 1896. After saying he feels “uprooted” following “the old man’s death,” Freud reports:
Otherwise, I am writing about infantile paralyses (Pegasus yoked) 2 and am enjoying my four cases and especially look forward to the prospect of talking to you for several hours. Lonely, that is understood. Perhaps I shall tell you a few small wild things in return for your marvelous ideas and findings. Less enjoyable is the state of my practice this year, on which my mood always remains dependent. With heart and nose I am satisfied again.
Recently I heard the first reaction to my incursion into psychiatry. From it I quote: “Gruesome, horrible, old wives’ psychiatry.” That was Rieger in Würzburg. I was highly amused. And, of all things, about paranoia, which has become so transparent!
Your book is still keeping us waiting. Wernicke recently referred a patient to me, a lieutenant who is in the officers’ hospital.
Then, after describing his dream the night after his father’s funeral, and the sign he imagined seeing in the barbershop, he tells Fliess:
I see little of the betrothed couple and the affair, unfortunately, gives me little pleasure. He is more sober and calmer, but his (and your) parents-in-law seem to show little adroitness in handling the relationship. It is not a pleasant topic between us; if you prefer, we shall not talk about it. It’s all rubbish, in any event.
My most cordial greetings to I.F. and R.W.; my wife probably is already with you.
Your
Sigm.
P.S. If Martha needs some money for purchases, you will no doubt lend it to her.
We don’t know who the betrothed couple was, or what the unhappy affair consisted of, except that it apparently involved a man married to Fliess’s wife’s sister. But what we do know is that Freud, in private matters, voiced his views strongly, and was determined to maintain the upper hand. We also see in this letter, written in the shadow of the assured character most people now make him out to be, that Freud was highly volatile, with pronounced mood swings and an honest awareness of them. Beyond being the great observer of humankind, he engaged deeply.
Maybe Dr. Solnit did, too—not that he would ever have shown it to me. Maybe Richard Karpe got an erection looking at Susie, and was not just the wise old man standing there. As Freud himself acknowledged about the memory loss, it all comes back to feelings.