MY PRIMARY SOURCE FOR THIS BOOK is a reprint of the article “The Significance of Freud’s Trip to Orvieto,” by Richard Karpe and Marietta Karpe. Their essay originally appeared in The Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines 17, no.1 (March 1979). The Israel Annals was published by the Jerusalem Academic Press for the Israel Psychiatric Association, but I do not know any precise details concerning the reprint. For all I know, my father, who owned Fox Press, a printing company, produced it for Richard and Marietta. My parents often played bridge with them, and I can just imagine a copy of The Israel Annals lying on this Viennese couple’s coffee table, my mother picking it up and seeing the article and becoming fascinated, my father suggesting that Fox Press could make copies for the Karpes’ family and friends (at no cost; my father would not have dreamed of letting them pay for this), and its being in my parents’ library, where I found it by chance, as a result of that sequence of events. But maybe the Karpes had the reprint made on their own (difficult though that would have been in those days before photocopying was as easy as it is today), or the magazine’s publisher provided tear sheets.
Throughout this book, I often quote from the Karpes’ article. Richard and Marietta presented this as a joint publication, with no distinction between them as co-authors, an idea that I find utterly charming, reflecting a rapport and ease at working together that few married couples could imagine, but, that said, I cannot help feeling that, in the more scholarly moments, Richard’s is the dominant voice, while, in the announcements of certain conclusions, it is Marietta whom we are hearing. After all, he was a psychoanalyst, used to saying little in his daily practice, habituated to probing for information and delving into his rich knowledge of other people’s views of the human mind, while she was a psychiatric social worker, more inclined to express her observations in order to help people take precise action. But all of this is hypothesis on my part.
When I quote the Karpes quoting other people—for example, from Freud’s letters to Fliess—I have done so, unfortunately, without knowing their sources, because Richard and Marietta’s endnotes do not name the publisher or the translator for the material they have used. In the following references, however, I have indicated my own sources, the literature beyond the Karpes’ article to which I gratefully turned in exploring the subject that Richard and Marietta make so provocative.
I cite herein each of my sources in connection with the first occasion I used it. Many of these sources, such the Karpes’ article, Freud’s letters to Fliess (published by Harvard University Press), etc., are subsequently used throughout the book.
FREUD’S MEMORY LOSS
Here my first source is The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). I do not know who translated the material from Freud’s letters to Fliess that the Karpes quote, but Jeffrey Masson’s rendition of these letters is lively and, I assume, exceedingly true to what it was that Freud wanted to communicate to his colleague.
When quoting from Freud’s essay “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” I have used the version in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III (1893–1898). This essay was initially published in the series Early Psycho-Analytic Publications (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1898). In the case of Freud’s own writing on forgetfulness, I have a strong preference for this translation of 1898, the same year that Freud wrote the essay in German—with the title “Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit.” Not only was this its first translation into English, with that timing making it seem so much more directly connected to the German original, but it has the added appeal that its translator was James Strachey, brother of Lytton Strachey, who is one of my favorite biographers and literary figures. James Strachey was a friend of many in the Bloomsbury group, which I consider to be an impeccable credential.
Throughout this book, I have used the Strachey translation.
The other source I have gratefully used is Gerald Corey, Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, 6th ed. (Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole, 2005).
CHAPTER 5
I have to admit to personal reasons for my choice of translation for Freud’s magisterial The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud wrote the text in 1901; I have used the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill’s translation (New York: Macmillan, 1914). I have probably done so more out of snobbery than scholarship.
If you wish, you can read a lot about which translations into English of Freud’s writing are closest to the original; it is a favorite subject of experts in the field. My choice of Brill is what I would have to call entirely impure, and one I might not even recognize had I not been psychoanalyzed myself.
My wife’s great-aunt, a psychoanalyst named Bettina Warburg, made me executor of her estate, and, since in that capacity I had the choice of certain books, I kept her copy of Brill’s translation of Freud. Moreover, I always thought it was a mark of class when a Warburg cousin, a member of the Lewisohn family, said that she and her sisters and their father and mother were all analyzed by Brill. She said this as if it were the equivalent of their owning paintings by Cézanne and Seurat (as they did) and getting their bibelots at Cartier’s. Most of you will deplore these credentials, and consider them foolish, but if you have read this book to this point, you already know a thing or two about its writer.
CHAPTER 7
I was overjoyed one day, while waiting for a meeting in the offices of Fayard, my French publisher, to see that, in 2005, they had published Sigmund Freud’s Notre coeur tend vers le sud: Correspondance de voyage, 1895–1923. One never knows when a book will appear, by chance, that provides enlightening material on a subject, but this haphazard occurrence led to my finding great riches concerning my subject; the translation from French into English is my own.
CHAPTER 9
Here I have drawn on Dugald McLellan’s Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes (Perugia: Quattroemme Srl, 1998). Again, I had great luck in finding a first-rate source. This slim volume was for sale at the souvenir shop operated by the ticket seller for the cathedral in Orvieto. It is an exceptionally intelligent guide to Signorelli’s series, of far greater use than the usual art history texts.
CHAPTER 13
In this chapter, I have drawn on some new sources. One is Peter Gay’s A Godless Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). I had the good fortune to have Peter Gay as my professor for a course on the Enlightenment at Columbia College, and I have great respect for the adroitness this distinguished professor had with regard to a range of subjects. Freud’s letter to Isaac Landman, from August 1, 1929, is quoted in that book.
I also quote from Lou Andreas-Salomé, Correspondance avec Sigmund Freud, 1912–1936 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). And now, as if I have taken a drug called “free-associate,” I must admit that I have always had a bit of a crush on Lou Andreas-Salomé, the name suggesting a certain Susie-like quality, as if she were sexy and brilliant. When writing the biography of Balthus, I encountered Lou because of her connection with Rainer Maria Rilke, who was Balthus’s mother’s lover and an indelible influence on both Balthus and his older brother, Pierre Klossowki. Pierre’s “Psychoanalytic Study of the Marquis de Sade,” which he wrote and published in a French medical journal in 1933, the year before Balthus painted his scandalous The Guitar Lesson, has a candor and honesty and insightfulness quite different from Balthus’s form of manipulation. The Guitar Lesson, with its violent and sexually charged imagery—the gender issues no simpler than they are in Signorelli’s art, and the rage and energy comparable—appeared as a full-page color reproduction to illustrate an excerpt from my biography of Balthus in The New Yorker, causing some people to cancel their subscriptions. Back to Lou: I knew about her mainly from Marie Bonaparte’s biographer, a wonderful woman named Celia Bertin. Marie Bonaparte was another intellectual hoyden who, in my lurid imagination, had an effect on Freud similar to Susie’s on Richard Karpe. Diagnosed with a “marked virility complex,” she was, at the end of Freud’s life, his pet analysand, to whom he famously gave daily two-hour sessions and talked about himself a lot; she served as a replacement in his affection for Lou. Celia proposed that I write a biography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and suggested it to both the head of Fayard and to Cartier-Bresson’s wife, the photographer Martine Franck. Franck did her best to steer me away from the project, with Bertrand telling me that there was a fear I would uncover some violence in the photographer. It is not just that he was said, at times, to shoot with a camera as if shooting with a gun; there were other secrets. I have always suspected they were connected with almost all the same issues, except for Jewishness, that come up in connection with Freud and his reactions to Signorelli’s frescoes. This ramble is to say that maybe a lot that is awakened, or repressed, in connection with the art in Orvieto is inherent in many more people than would ever acknowledge it.
In this chapter, I also quote from the excellent writing of Paul C. Vitz, who wrote “Sigmund Freud’s Attraction to Christianity: Biographical Evidence” published in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 6, no. 1 (January 1, 1983). I am grateful beyond words to my younger daughter, Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist in London, for providing me with this, as well as with most of the material I have from psychoanalytic journals, which she uncovered at the library of the Tavistock Institute and other places where she studied.
The letter to Emil Fluss that Freud wrote on September 18, 1872, was published in Ernst Freud, “Some Early Unpublished Letters of Freud,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50 (1969).
CHAPTER 15
The article by Silas L. Warner, “Freud and the Mighty Warrior,” was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 19 (1991).
CHAPTER 16
Maud Cruttwell’s Luca Signorelli was first published in London by George Bell & Sons in 1899; I used a reprint.
CHAPTER 20
Again, I have depended on a Strachey translation: Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study (1935), translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
CHAPTER 21
Here I have depended on a couple of the staples of any art historian’s library: Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, in this case the version translated by Betty Burroughs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), and Bernhard Berenson’s The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899). Both books are full of malarkey, but at least Vasari and Berenson were enthusiastic, and really liked looking at painting as well as living well; they beat the more academic types of today.
CHAPTER 22
Here I add to my sources a fine book on Hannibal: Theodore Ayrault Dodge, Hannibal: A History of the Art of War Among the Carthaginians and Romans Down to the Battle of Pydna, 168 B.C., (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). I also researched Hannibal in Livy’s The History of Rome, published in so many forms and so many languages and in so many ways on the Internet that, accurate or not—which I am ill-equipped to say—it is the gospel.
CHAPTER 27
Here two great new sources enter the mix: John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Freud Scenario, translated by Quentin Hoare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Sartre’s screenplay, with Freud as the leading character, must be one of the least well known aspects about Sartre’s life, its obscurity making it all the more fascinating.
CHAPTER 31
The text I used for “The Moses of Michelangelo” is from Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
The gem of a letter on eels’ testicles, with those amazing drawings, comes from The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein 1871–1881, edited by Walter Boehlich, and translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). The specific letter quoted is the one Freud wrote to Silberstein on April 5, 1876. If it is the sort of thing that interests you, you can find out lots more about eels’ testicles, a fertile subject, about which many people have written.
CHAPTER 32
Here I have used the very good book by Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
CHAPTER 34
Like many people, I am an ardent devotee of Stefan Zweig. That said, his book The Mental Healers, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, (New York: Viking Press, 1932) is, in spite of the qualities I mention in my text, a real disappointment. It just doesn’t sing the way Zweig’s writing usually does. I much prefer my other source in this chapter: The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Like all good dictionaries, it offers surprises and rich material on every page.
CHAPTER 35
The superbly revealing letter from Sigmund Freud to Martha Bernays, which Freud wrote his fiancée on December 20, 1883, and from which I quote again in chapter 38, is from Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939 edited by Ernst l. Freud and translated by I. and J. Stern (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).
CHAPTER 38
I am among the people who think that the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have made a life-altering difference to the felicity with which we can read all sorts of fantastic Russian novels, which even in their earlier translations are superb. In this chapter, I have quoted from Pevear and Volokhonsky's notes to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
CHAPTER 39
My source for Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” is, again, Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
CHAPTER 41
Here I add three new sources: Jean Babelon, Titien (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1950); Louis Hourticq, La Jeunesse de Titien (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1919); Maurice Hamel, Titien (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1935). I could claim some scholarly reason for having used obscure French sources on Titian, and you might be especially impressed that the sculptor Henri Laurens was the publisher of the series in which the latter appeared. The real reason, however, is that, following a squash game in Paris, I decided to spend some time in the excellent small library of the club where I played. The Parisian pundits I read that happy day had such a great feeling for the Titian paintings of interest to me that, yet again, chance brought me insight.
CHAPTER 44
Here I draw upon a new source on Luca Signorelli, from the marvelous magazine American Imago of wich Freud was a cofounder. The article by Margaret E. Owens, “Forgetting Signorelli: Monstrous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead,” appeared in American Imago 61, no. 1 (2004).
Like most people, I really struggle to understand Jacques Lacan, but for his views on the Orvieto incident, he was relatively clear, or else I was relatively sharper than usual, and I benefited greatly from Alan Sheridan’s translation of Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). The original French edition was published in Paris in 1973.
AFTERWORD
First, I want to credit Crystal Sikma for the Churchill correction. I feel blessed to have had this text reviewed by someone who catches what most people would let fly, tracks things down, and corrects falsities, even widely accepted ones, graciously.
I find that one of the single greatest pleasures in life is to receive a book from one of my daughters that shows how much she is plugged into my interests in life, especially since, by the standards of the day, my tastes are pretty arcane. Charlotte recently gave me Bernard Berenson’s late-life diaries Sunset and Twilight—I blame the publisher, Hamish Hamilton, good as they are, for that trite title, which Berenson himself would not have countenanced (the book came out in 1964, five years after his death)—with its superb introduction by Iris Origo. How I wish that there were more writers as articulate and as engaged in the pleasures of life, especially as manifest in the glories of Italian civilization, as those two were. Origo led me to thinking about William Butler Yeats, whose splendid biography by R. F. Foster, published by Oxford University Press in 2003, I have, not surprisingly, in the library of our house in Ireland, and there I found the wonderful poetry I quote in this afterword. Yeats’s lines seem both perfectly on target for my subject and are—to use an adjective I, with unabashed sexism, believe should generally be struck from the vocabulary of males, but is, on very rare occasions, the only word that really applies—divine.