THERE IS NO EXPLAINING WHY INFORMATION COMES when it does, but it was only late in the game that I discovered that Jacques Lacan had written about Freud and Signorelli. He did so in 1973, six years before the Karpes wrote their paper. Surprisingly, the Karpes make no mention of it.
Lacan first addressed the subject near the end of a seminar on “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.” In 2004, a scholar named Margaret Owens wrote on the subject:
Here Lacan comments on the “denuded metonymy,” the linguistic pathway, that cryptically inscribes Freud’s repressed desire. Lacan notices that in forgetting “Signorelli,” Freud has forgotten himself; he has engineered his own effacement. Signorelli, after all, shares the first syllable of Sigmund. Indeed Freud has a double claim to Signor, as an approximation of his first name and as an honorific, the equivalent of Herr. In Lacan’s reading of the incident, forgetting “Signorelli” is a defensive gesture against the Absolute Master, or Death. Ironically, in striving to ward off this threat, Freud has effaced himself, unconsciously rehearsed his own castration and his own death.
Owens’s summation is helpful for the clarity with which it articulates Lacan’s idea that in trying to ward off death by forgetting Signorelli’s name, Freud “effaced”—symbolically killed off and castrated—himself. Lacan’s own words are harder to grasp, but they are worth reading as an indication of how far one can go with the notion of what the forgetting of Signorelli’s name could be seen to mean:
The term Signor, Herr, passes underneath—the absolute master, I once said, which is in fact death, has disappeared there. Furthermore, do we not see, behind this, the emergence of that which forced Freud to find in the myths of the death of the father the regulation of his desire? After all, it is to be found in Nietzsche, who declares, in his own myth, that God is dead. And it is perhaps against the background of the same reasons. For the myth of the God is dead—which, personally, I feel much less sure about, as a myth of course, than most contemporary intellectuals, which is in no sense a declaration of theism, nor of faith in the resurrection—perhaps this myth is simply a shelter against the threat of castration.
If you know how to read them, you will see this threat in the apocalyptic frescoes of Orvieto cathedral.
Is this psychobabble, or is it wisdom? Should I accept the complexity of a lot that I find difficult to understand, or was there still some very simple explanation I had overlooked?