IN SEPTEMBER OF 1897, the forty-one-year-old Sigmund Freud set out for central Italy. A high point of the trip for the Viennese neurologist, who was then fine-tuning the process he called “psychoanalysis,” was his encounter with a fresco cycle by the Renaissance master Luca Signorelli in the cathedral at Orvieto. This brilliantly colored group of pictures packed into a small side chapel is a vivid depiction of muscular nude men. Depending on the destiny meted out to them in the Last Judgment, most of these burly specimens of raw masculine power are consigned to forms of damnation rendered in horrific detail, while a few ascend to a heavenly bliss. With their ripped torsos and gladiators’ limbs, they go to the limits of their physical force. Many of them are engaged in furious battle. They inflict torture brutally or muster supernatural strength to defend themselves against it. The selected elite have no such struggles as they celebrate their reward for an admirable past, but we hardly notice them in their boring calm.
A year after the visit to Orvieto, Freud started to talk to a traveling companion about these early-sixteenth-century paintings that had moved him deeply. Some sources—and there are numerous accounts of the events that followed—say that the conversation occurred on a train Freud was taking on a trip into Herzegovina, having left behind his sick wife. But in his own version of the facts, which Freud wrote less than a week after the journey when he enthused about the frescoes, he reports that he was on a carriage drive from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic) into a nearby village in Herzegovina for an idyllic outing during a late-summer holiday. The person with whom he was speaking was, depending on the source, either a complete stranger or a Berlin lawyer, Herr Freyhau, whom Freud apparently already knew.
For all the discrepancies of details, the main event that concerns us is always recounted in the same way. It is that, to his immense frustration, Freud could not recall the name of the artist. Following the journey, he wrote his friend Wilhelm Fliess, “I could not find the name of the renowned painter who did the Last Judgment in Orvieto, the greatest I have seen so far.” For at least two days (the duration varies according to the source; again we are in murky territory), Freud sustained the memory loss, and was reduced to “inner torment”—his words—as he repeatedly tried but failed to conjure the artist’s name.
To his amazement, Freud could, nonetheless, see certain details of the fresco cycle perfectly in his mind’s eye. Then, once he was reminded that the person who had made these powerful paintings had the last name of Signorelli, he recalled that the first name was Luca, and instantly lost his ability to envision the art.
Freud at the time was embarking on his self-analysis. Using elements of the technique that “Anna O”—the pseudonym of a patient of his colleague Josef Breuer—called the “talking cure,” he was hoping to treat his own “psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias” by investigating his dreams and memories. What he could not remember intrigued him even more. He was startled by his inability to recall the name of an artist he felt he should have easily recalled, and considered his incapacity revelatory.
Freud became determined to understand his own mental process generated by the discussion he had been having that prompted him to envision the paintings at Orvieto and then to bury the name Signorelli. He wrote Fliess, “In the conversation, which aroused memories that evidently caused the repression, we talked about death and sexuality. . . . How can I make this credible to anyone?” It was as if he believed that the subject matter of the conversation had caused him to block out the name, and his greatest task was to have others recognize that link. I believe that Freud, focusing only on the need to convince others of general mental processes, was managing to avoid personal truths that made him unbearably uncomfortable. The folderol about the impossibility of bringing the name Signorelli to the conscious part of his mind was like the parapraxis itself: an obfuscation. By that I do not mean a deliberate deception. I mean that Uncle Siggy, like the rest of us, just could not always cope with the complexity of being human.
FIVE DAYS AFTER DESCRIBING THIS MEMORY LOSS, Freud wrote Fliess again to say that he had completed an essay on “the phenomenon of forgetfulness,” which he had sent to a medical journal. He began that early short text on the mysterious workings of the human mind almost as if he were writing a folktale: “In the middle of carrying on a conversation we find ourselves obliged to confess to the person we are talking to that we cannot hit on a name we wanted to mention at that moment, and we are forced to ask for his—usually ineffectual—help. ‘What is his name? I know it so well. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Just this minute it’s escaped me.’”
Freud is describing something familiar to all of us when he then says that either we come up with a substitute name or we become convinced we know the first letter of the forgotten name. “We say, for instance: ‘It begins with a “B.”’ If we finally succeed, in one way or another, in discovering what the name is, we find in the great majority of cases that it does not begin with a ‘B’ and does not in fact contain the letter ‘B’ at all.”
Freud discounts the idea that Signorelli’s paintings themselves played a role in his inability to remember the name of the person who conceived and executed them. This strikes me as a mistake, since he emphasizes the powerful impact the Orvieto frescoes had on him: “I was able to conjure up the pictures with greater sensory vividness than is usual with me.” Yet rather than considering that the paintings themselves had elements that caused the mental block, Freud maintains that it was his will to forget something he was previously considering that prompted the lapse. He says that he was deliberately trying not to bring up an indelicate subject with his traveling companion. To keep the possibly offensive topic at bay, he had, just prior to describing the Orvieto frescoes, been consciously trying not to think about the connection between sexuality and the end of life. He had also tried to push from his mind an anecdote related to that theme. As he explains it, his efforts brought an unexpected price. The desire he had had, a moment earlier, to force himself to forget a provocative issue had caused him to be blind to the name Signorelli. He makes the link: “The influence which had made the name Signorelli inaccessible to memory, or, as I am accustomed to say, had ‘repressed’ it, could only proceed from the story I had suppressed about the value set on death and sexual enjoyment.”
THE INCIDENT OF HIS FORGETTING THE ARTIST’S NAME would preoccupy the father of psychoanalysis. When he wrote The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, he opened the book with a discussion of his inability to recall Signorelli’s name and the incorrect substitutions he made for it. Again he refers to his “repressed thoughts” as the reason for the confabulation that occurred when he pictured the Orvieto frescoes and came up with various other artists’ names but not the right one.
Jacques Lacan and other psychoanalysts have dug deep to try to understand what Freud was repressing. What undid Freud so that he drew a blank on the artist’s name is usually interpreted pretty much in the same vein. The pundits mainly emphasize the linguistic connections between the forgotten name and its incorrect substitutions and find links between the incorrect replacements for Signorelli and places important to Freud’s history. The experts who have tried to unravel the psychoanalyst’s own parapraxis, Freud himself among them, have mainly concentrated on dissecting the name Signorelli along with the names of the other artists that came to Freud’s mind instead. These authorities on the human mind impose constraints on their investigation, focusing more on the replacements than the memory loss itself, and push their own agendas. Something essential is missing.
Until now, the parapraxis has only been considered by specialists in psychoanalysis—rather than by someone like me, for whom art is a language with greater force than words. The imagery of the frescoes has been given a secondary role at best, their aesthetics an even more minor position.
I believe that, by giving insufficient weight to what Freud actually saw in Orvieto, the mental-health experts miss the boat. In the case of the academics, it’s the usual thing: They follow a footnote to an idea, and take it to the nth degree, without opening their eyes to new ways of seeing or to the importance of irrational feelings. As for Freud: I think that by minimizing the effect the painting themselves had on him, and by virtually eliminating Signorelli’s art from his detailed exploration of why he could not recall the artist’s name, he was either being extremely shortsighted because he unconsciously was avoiding seeing many of his own truths or else he was deliberately creating a red herring with which he appeared to be investigating his own depths but in fact was achieving a masterpiece of concealment.
I am convinced that it was the artworks themselves, which, for understandable reasons, destabilized Freud. Painted with athletic vigor in dazzling reds and yellows, they have that power. Like all researchers, I am far from objective, and I am among those people for whom the visual evokes a more direct response than does the verbal. Here I bring my own experience and feelings to bear; but in investigating this, I have discovered that on more than one occasion Freud responded to well-crafted paintings on a very personal level. He, too, was one of those people for whom good art was mind-altering. The impact of the Orvieto frescoes on him warrants a scrutiny it has never had; it must be considered in light of his intense personal responsiveness to great paintings, not as a matter of linguistic gymnastics.
What Luca Signorelli shows in the Orvieto frescoes, consistent with a lot of other paintings he made, and the robust and convincing way in which he presents it, is, I feel, the basis—far more than any of the explanations given either by Freud himself or by others in his field—for the loss of memory that was so dramatic for a practitioner whose entire craft was based on the ability to remember and retain, and on the power of sexual feeling.