timpanaro roman phobia

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Sebastiano Timpanaro

Freuds Roman Phobia

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It is well known that, about the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud had apersistent desire to visit Rome that was repeatedly frustrated on account of

a neurotic inhibition.* He planned several trips to Rome, and even set out on

some of them, but a powerful phobia stopped him from reaching his goal.

Only on 2 September 1901 did he finally succeed (with unexpected ease,

given the strength of his earlier inhibition) in entering the city of his

yearning; thereafter, he returned to Rome a number of times without

difficulty. Freud makes frequent reference to this phobia of his in The

Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung)1

and in the letters to Wilhelm Fliessdating from the same period. He recounts incidents from his unsuccessful

trips; he writes of dreams about his desire to reach Rome, about his sadness

in failing to do so and the fear which held him back. He also indicates the

cause, or rather the network of closely interlinked causes, to which he

attributes his inhibition.


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The Value of Freuds Own Interpretation

For reasons which I have tried to make clear elsewhere, and whichsomeday, perhaps, I shall explain more fully,2 the interpretations givenin Freuds writings of dreams, slips and neurotic symptoms have alwaysseemed to me among the weakest aspects of his scholarly work (theyare of the greatest interest, on the other hand, if we take them not as

interpretations but as themselves manifestations of that anguishedhyper-psychologism, that psychic malaise which has so widely afflictedthe more sophisticated and decadent members of the twentieth-centurybourgeoisie). Freuds greatness, I believe, is much rather the greatnessof Proust, Kafka, Musil or Joyce than that of a great scientist. At thesame time, though in lesser measure, I also believe that Freud madecontributions of real scientific value, and that some even of hisinterpretations are highly probable (naturally I do not state that theyare right, such judgements being the province of the psychologist orthe professional psychiatrist). Among these I would include the expla-nation which Freud gives of his Roman phobia.

However, by a turn of events which appears something of a paradox,orthodox Freudians have not accepted this explanation, and indeedhave not even troubled to refute it, even though, despite theirunquestionable intelligence, they have unhesitatingly gone along withother interpretations of Freuds which I would regard as altogetherunprovable and ridiculous. At the best, they have allowed that Freudgave some tentative beginnings of an interpretation but soon aban-

doned itcensoring himself, they imply, from motives of personaldiscretion. At the worst, they have flatly denied that Freud offered any

* Dedicated to the memory of Antonio Torelli.1 References to Freuds works are to theStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

Freud, ed. James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press (abbreviated as SE). The Interpretation of Dreams (SE

vols IVV) is generally referred to by its apter German title, Traumdeutung. The Italian edition of

Freuds works (Opere, Turin 19671980) has occasionally been cited (as O), especially where I am

concerned, not with Freuds text, but with Cesare Musattis Introductions to various volumes. The

letters to W. Fliess (translated into English in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, New York 1954) have

been referred to by their dates. Finally the authors surnames alone indicate references to Ernest Jones,Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, London 195557 (3 vols.) and to Marthe Robert,DOedipe Mose, Paris

1974 (my friend Franco Belgrado brought this work to my notice before the Italian version came out).

Belfagoris a well-known Italian periodical, in which an article by Musatti, to which I frequently refer,

appeared in 1980.2 Perhaps the reader will forgive me if I refer here to my book Il Lapsus Freudiano (Florence 1974). In

Italy, this has had an almost unanimously hostile reception (and not one psychiatrist has even deigned

to contradict it: they have taken refuge in silence!), whereas in Britain and America it has at least been

discussed, and has met with some agreement (the English translation, by Kate Soper, was published as

The Freudian Slip, NLB, London 1976). Cf. also my new edition of Rudolf Meringers 1923 articleDie

tglichen Fehler im Sprechen, Lesen und Handeln. This essay, which in my view deserves wide recognition,

first appeared as a reply to FreudsPsychopathology of Everyday Life (in Wrte und Sachen, VIII, 1923, pp.

122141; reprinted, with my translation, notes and Postscript, in Critica Storica, XIX, 1982, pp. 393485). My friend Rudolf Fhrer first drew my attention to this article by Meringer, who anticipates

some of my own comments on the Freudian interpretation of slips. The republication which I edited,

spoilt as it is by numerous printing errors and several inaccuracies of translation, does make clear, in

its notes and in the Postscript, the value of Meringers work (and this 1923 article receives less attention

than it should in the study of Meringer, with reference to the interpretation of slips, which Victoria

Fromkin and a group of American fellow-scholars embarked on some years ago); and it also gave me

the opportunity to clarify and amplify various points which I had made in The Freudian Slip.

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interpretation whatever.3 They have then hastened to proffer, withvarying degrees of self-confidence, interpretations of their own con-formable to psychoanalytic orthodoxyand therefore similar to theweakest put forward by Freud himself!

Freud did impose, especially in The Interpretation of Dreams, censorshipwhich was not only unconscious, but quite openly intentional. He

frequently brought this to bear where he would otherwise have beenobliged, in the explanation of his own dreams, to disclose excessivelyintimate details of his private life and his sexual psychology. We havehis own word for this, both in the Preface to the works first edition(1899) and at various points in the text, one of which has to do with hisreflections on the phobia about Rome.4 However, it is one thing toleave out references to autobiographical details, even important ones; itis another to have fabricated an entire interpretation, which Freudhimself would have thought to be false, and which has little kinship

with Freudian explanations of the usual type.

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But this, according tothe more moderate Freudians, was precisely what Freud did. As totheir more extreme colleagues, we have already seen their claim thathe simply refrained from any explicit explanation. The zeal of theirFreudian orthodoxy thus leads them to censor Freuds own textwhichdoes not seem to me a legitimate procedure.

Roman Weather/Fear of Travelling

One point must be cleared up at the outset. When I speak of Freuds

interpretation, I am not referring to the first, very brief note (SE IV, p.194) in which Freud speaks of reasons of health as preventing histravelling to Rome. Here he has in mind the unwholesome climatewhich, exaggeratedly feared as it was by Northerners, did indeedafflict the city in late summer and early autumn (the only time of yearwhen Freud was free to travel). Jones (II, p. 18) and Musatti (O IV, p.

x) are right to reject this explanation as altogether inadequate, thoughI do not in all honesty believe we can regard it as nothing but arationalization: as we have noted, the unhealthy Roman climate (malariaand sirocco!) was at this time the subject of widespread and not entirely

groundless fear. The city was bordered by marshes where malaria wasrife, and within Rome itself there remained areas either still affected bythe disease or but recently freed of it. The nineteenth-century Italianpoet Giosue Carducci called for the Goddess Febris, venerated andfeared by the ancient Romans, to return, as if she alone could check theflood of speculative building let loose by the reclamation of the Roman

3 See the works by Jones and Robert cited in note 1, and also the works which I cite below by Musatti,

Anzieu and Schorske. While these scholars do remark on Freuds writings about his identification with

Hannibal and his hatred-fear of the Catholic Church as a persecutor of the Jews, they deny, more or

less explicitly, that this is of any value in interpreting Freuds phobia. Some of them, as we shall see,

advance alternative interpretations; others find it necessary to make additions and corrections to

Freuds account, and thus, in reality, to alter it profoundly.4 Cf. SE IV, p. 194: There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail.5 This seems to me a legitimate comment, even though I am aware that at the time of the Traumdeutung

psychoanalysis (still in its earliest form) was not yet fully born, though its birth was under way. In this

connection, see also section 6, below.

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malarial swamps now that the city had become the Italian capital.6

(Carducci, greatly esteemed in his own day for the feeblest of hisversesthose in which, reneging on his youthful Jacobinism, he takeson the role of laureate to the new monarchical and nationalistic Italystill deserves to be read today, when he is no longer the object of suchexcessive enthusiasm: as well as his early Jacobin poems, there areothers, inspired by a powerfully felt sadness and regret for the transience

of lifes glory.) The sirocco, a debilitating wind which was itself thoughtto cause malaria, was no less feared by robust Northerners. At the timeof the Restoration, the distinguished Prussian historian and politician,B. G. Niebuhr, who came to Rome as ambassador to the Papal States,suffered from an obsessional fear of the sirocco, which began before hearrived in the city and continued for some time afterwards. When hewas first at work on the Traumdeutung, Freud of course had no directexperience to go on, but when, having overcome his neurosis, hevisited Rome for the first time, he did indeed fall victim to a severe

prostration induced by the sirocco, which ruined the final days of hisstay (letter to Fliess, 19 September 1901). It seems reasonable, then, toregard his note as a rationalization only in the sense that it was theexaggeration of a genuine fear: otherwise, it is hard to see why Freud, whenhe came shortly afterwards (as we shall see) to set out what he regardedas the fundamental grounds for his Roman phobia, did not remove hisreference to the unhealthy climate. It must admittedly be conceded thathis exposition taken as a whole is no model of coherence or consistentdevelopment (in this, it is typical of the Traumdeutung, much of whosefascination derives from its being at once autobiography and treatise).

However, that Freud retained his note on the climate surely indicatesthat he continued to regard it as playing a real part, though a restrictedand secondary one, in the aetiology of his fear of travelling to Rome.

One further preliminary point needs to be made. The Roman phobiawas a particularly severe manifestation of a more general phobia, towhich Freud was especially subject in his youth but of which he wasnever completely cured: a fear of travelling, and notably of travellingby train. This was by no means an insuperable neurosis, for Freudtravelled extensively, but he had often to suppress a state of anxiety

which sometimes became acute. Jones gives abundant evidence of thisin his biography (I, pp. 14, 197f., 335) but neither he nor any otherscholar (apart from Musatti, in one cursory note) connects it in any waywith the Roman phobia. Obviously, a fear of travelling in generalcannot account for the much more intense fear of going to Rome, but it isstill worth noting that the latter germinated, so to speak, in the field ofthis broader but analogous phobia. If we remember this, we shall see all

6 The Goddess Febris had three temples in Rome, the chief of which was on the Palatine. A well-

known satire of Horaces (II 6, 18f.) includes the most famous classical literary reference to Romesautumnal malaria, which Horace connects with the sirocco. I point this out, not in order to display my

classical erudition, but because Freud must have been aware of the passage from his secondary school

days. Public health conditions in late 19th-century Rome and its environment are fully discussed in

Angelo Celli,Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia dallunit al fascismo, ed M. L. Petri and A. Gigli, Milan

1982. (I am grateful to Tomasso Detti for pointing this work out to me.) The Carducci Ode which I

mention is Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla (1877): see his Opere, Bologna 1935, pp. 1819, and see also

the note (p. 152) which he added in 1893.

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the more clearly how implausible are some of the interpretations of theRoman phobia which certain Freudians have put forward.

Identification with Hannibal

Let us now turn at last to the real explanation of his Roman phobiawhich Freud gives in the Traumdeutung (VB: SE IV, p. 196f ). On his last

journey to Italy (in 1897: we must bear in mind that the first edition ofthe Traumdeutung came out in 1900), Freud travelled as far as LakeTrasimene, where he saw the Tiber and where he was only fifty milesfrom Rome; but he then felt obliged to turn back. At this point, hefound himself thinking of a piece of writing which included a passage(referred to further below) concerning Hannibal. I had actually beenfollowing in Hannibals footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to seeRome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone hadexpected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble inthese respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days.

Freud now recalls and distinguishes two successive phases of his passionfor Hannibal. In a first stage, he had sided emotionally with theCarthaginian hero, as had many of his contemporaries. (This hadnothing to do with Hannibals Semitic origins, being rather a typicalschoolboy affection for defeated heroes, such as has inclined all of us toprefer Hector to Achilles, Hannibal to Scipio, and so on: I myself,though not of Semitic birth, was led by a Hannibalism of this kind,which lasted right into my adolescence, to consume, in indigestibleamounts, the most varied literature on the second Punic war.) In asecond phase, while he was attending the Obergymnasium (secondaryschool), Freuds sense of being isolated in a hostile environment7many of his peers were anti-semiticlent an intenser and morepolemical tone to his love of Hannibal, whom he now saw as a Semitichero, beaten by the Romans but never yielding to them. To myyouthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between thetenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church.8

The reader will have remarked that there is in Freuds account (and itis clearly evident already in his adolescent feelings) a certain chrono-logical elision and superimposition. Hannibals defeat was due essen-tially to the inadequate support which he received from his nativecountry. Though in military genius he outshone the Roman comman-ders (Scipio included), he had to confront with ever dwindling forcesthe combined assault of the Italian legions, which remained (barringone or two defections) loyal to Rome.9 But the organization whichFreud sees as his enemy in the last words of the passage just cited is not

7 This is an interesting piece of evidence, for it reveals that Freud had experienced anti-Semitism

before he ever became a university student, contrary to the account which he gives elsewhere (e.g. SE

XX, p. 9) and which his biographers repeat.8 Freud also traces his Roman phobia to his identification with Hannibal in his letter to Fliess of3December 1897.9 The contrast between Hannibals heroic isolation and the strength of the Romans, a contrast

heightened by the envy which the Carthaginians felt towards him, is feelingly drawn in the opening

pages of the Vita by Cornelius Nepos. Cornelius Nepos, who here writes with an absence of Roman

chauvinism uncommon in Latin literature, was much studied at school for the stylistic simplicity of his

Vitae; it is thus quite likely that Freud had read him, though I cannot confirm this from any detailed

knowledge of the Latin curriculum taught in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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ancient Rome but the Catholic Church, the persectuor of the Jews.(Freud, growing up amid the extreme Catholicism of the HabsburgEmpire, met with a form of anti-Semitism which was still Catholic, andmore generally Christian, rather than racist.) In the end, therefore, theessential emotional opposition was between Hannibal and the CatholicChurch, though Freud did not, of course, overlook the immensedistance between these two in terms of time, ideology and circum-

stances.

All his life, Freud remained convinced that his discovery of a theory soanti-conformist and revolutionary as psychoanalysis had been madeeasier by his Jewishness, which involved him in battling against aconformist, deeply prejudiced compact majority hostile to anyone whochose to differ from it.10 When he joined the Jewish Bnai Brithassociation (in 1926: SE, XX, pp. 246f), he declared quite openly that,being neither a practising Jew nor a Jewish nationalist, he felt boundto the Jewish community, and proud to be a Jew, only because this lefthim free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use oftheir intellect. On the other hand, Freuds Jewish origin, although itmay have helped in the genesis of psychoanalysis, hindered its accept-ance by the compact majority, among whom anti-Semitism wasprevalent (ibid). For this reason, Freud strove constantly to enlist non-Jewish followers, and his initial enthusiasm for Jung owed a great dealto the latters Christian origins: Freud looked to Jung (and to Pfister,and others) to prevent the spread of psychoanalysis from being checkedby any belief that it was necessarily connected with Judaism, and he

often denied that any such connection existed. Jungs defection,however, then confirmed him in his view that psychoanalysis wouldhave particular difficulty in retaining the allegiance of non-Jews. Andwhen, under the Nazis, anti-Semitism raged with unprecedented viru-lence, psychoanalysis was inevitably condemned.11 But we are strayingtoo far from the time and situation in which the young Freud wasafflicted by his Roman phobia.

10 Cf. SE XX, pp. 9, 246. In both passages, the phrase compact majority (in German, kompakte

Majoritt) is enclosed by Freud himself in inverted commas. This is a quotation, then; and it derives

(as Freuds editors have noted) from Ibsen, in whose An Enemy of the People a similar expression isfrequently used.11 Until, in slavish obedience to Hitler, it passed anti-Jewish laws, Italian fascism was not hostile to

psychoanalysis. The inherentpotentialfor such hostility was no doubt there, in that fascism owed its

character to the uncouth rather than to the refined bourgeoisie; before 1938, however, this was

realized only in a few sporadic outbreaks. Mussolini valued psychoanalysis (though it seems unlikely

that he can have understood it very well), and was a friend of Edoardo Weiss, the father of Italian

psychoanalysis. In the Enciclopedia Italiana, which was completed before the anti-Jewish laws were

passed, the articles on Freud(XVI, p. 73f) and onpsychoanalysis (XXVIII, p. 455ff) were entrusted to

Weiss; since they are not just objective, but sympathetic, Weiss clearly expressed his own ideas

untroubled by the censor. It was through Weiss that Freud sent a piece of his own writing to

Mussolini, accompanying it with a flattering dedication (cf. Musatti, Introduction to O XI, p. xii). I

note this, not for the sake of retailing petty gossip about Freud, but because we should not forgetthough to remember it is painfulthat even the most brilliant and humane of bourgeois intellectuals

allowed themselves to be seduced by the image of the strong man (see also section 5, below), and

were blinded, by their inveterately anti-democratic and anti-socialist cast of mind, to the coming flood

of fascist barbarism, in which they were to be swept away. Of course we must not forget that in

Stalinist Russia, too, crude ideas of health and decadence, quite at variance with true communist

principles, resulted in the excommunication of psychoanalysis (while leading Trotsky to take an interest

in it).

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Freuds equation of Judaism with non-conformity was not altogetherunfounded, but it was certainly overstated and one-sided: throughouthistory, after all, there have been people free of prejudice and capable ofrevolutionary thought, who have braved persecution and death fortheir ideas, and very many of them have been non-Jews. However,Freuds intention was less to make a generalized observation than todefend the claims of those intellectual Jews who had refused to resign

themselves to persecution or to accept their inferior legal and socialstatus. Freud was not only refusing allegiance to the non-Jewishcompact majority; he was also rebuking the majority of Jews, whohad either enduredand, sometimes, fatalistically acceptedpersecu-tion, discrimination and contempt, or else had submitted to Christianconversion so that they might be treated (though always within certainlimits) as equals, and had then done everything possible to obliteratetheir origins, often displaying an excessive patriotic loyalty towardswhichever state they lived in.12 As Freud came to recognize when hewas about ten or eleven, his father Jakob was an immediate and, tohim, painful case of such a Jew, resigned though not a convert. Indeedthe passage cited above, where Freud speaks of his love of Hannibaland his hatred of the Catholic Church, is followed at once by hisrecollection of the famous incident in which his father told him how aChristian had humiliated him (seizing his cap and throwing it into themud, and ordering him off the pavement) while he, Jakob, had offeredno resistance to this outrage. The young Freud was ashamed and a littlecontemptuous of his fathers conduct. He renewed his identificationwith Hannibal (at this time, when he was ten or eleven, or initially later,

looking back on the incident?), and regretted that his own father solittle resembled Hamilcar Barca,13 the father of his hero, who had madehis son swear undying hatred of the Romans and had inculcated in hima spirit not of resignation but of rebellion (SE, IV, p. 197).

The Tragic Destiny of the Isolated Hero

Freuds sense of his own difference from the compact majority waslargely transferred, in adult life, to the ethical-intellectual plane: thestress fell on his freedom from prejudice, his capacity for originalthought, his non-conformity. But when he was a young child (withlittle or no idea of freedom of thought), it expressed itself in the formof admiration for warrior-heroesCromwell, whose savage heroismhad not prevented him from protecting the Jews; Andr Massna, thegreat general of the Napoleonic age, who was (or was thought to be) ofJewish origin; Napoleon himself, whose contradictory political conduct

12 Freud himself was not immune to such excesses, and their sincerity makes his case all the more

melancholy. Early in the Great War, Freud was a keen supporter of Austrian militarism: only when the

horrible massacre dragged on, and it began to look as if the outcome would be unfavourable to the

Central Powers, did he begin to form a more considered and painful view of the phenomenon of war.

(War, that is, between civilized peoples, in the great world-dominating nations of the white race; hecontinued to find colonialism unobjectionable: cf. SE XIV, p. 276.) Moreover, even distinguished

Italian intellectuals such as Benedetto Croce and Gaetano De Sanctis, who espoused neutrality during

the First World War, approved of colonial wars, which they saw as advancing the cause of civilization.13 In the first edition of the Traumdeutung, Freud, through a slip, wrote Hasdrubal instead of

Hamilcar. Freuds explanation of this slip, given in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, (SE VI, pp.

218220), is still accepted by the Freudians; it should be compared with the, in my view, simpler and

more convincing explanation in The Freudian Slip, op. cit, p. 165f.

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towards the Jews had led in some circumstances to their emancipation,and who was an enemy of the Papacy.14 We shall see that Freud felt asimilar, and very strong, identification with Moses. It has already beenremarked, moreover, that Freud, never content to be a psychiatrist andan intellectual of the highest repute, always aspired to a quasi-politicalrole, as founder and leader of a sect.15 That he did so contrasts, or atleast seems to contrast, with the thorough-going reactionary stupidity

which (pace the Marxist Freudians, and brief lucid intervals apart) hedisplayed in all his forays into the field of politics properly so called.16

The identification with Hannibal was thus one of several similaridentifications, though the others were less intense and less deeplyrooted in the unconscious.

All these valiant, isolated heroes were, however, defeated in the end.Before he died, Cromwell was to see the resurgence of those forcesagainst which he had struggled with all his might. Napoleon wasvanquished; Massna, after the reverses he met with in Portugal, went

into sad decline. Above all, Freuds favourite hero, the great Hannibalhimself, was defeated. He never managed to set foot in Romeneitherafter his victory at Cannae (when instead of attending to the advice ofMaharbal, his cavalry commander, he went to Capua to rest his troops),nor subsequently. His identification with Hannibal (and to a lesserextent with the other generals we have mentioned) encouraged Freudnever to yield to the enemy, never to abase himself before him; but atthe same time it betokened defeat, and was thus a source of depression:history seemed to teach that the solitary hero must come to grief in thestruggle with the organization of the mediocre. In the particular caseof Hannibal, Freuds identification led to a neurotic feeling that it wasimpossible for him to reach Rome. Those same obscure forces whichhad prevented Hannibal, even at the height of his military success, fromstorming the enemy capital and thus winning the war,17 now blockedFreuds path, holding him in the grip of an unconscious inhibition.Places and circumstances connected with Hannibal made him feel

14 SE IV, p. 197f. It is true that Freud does not speak of Napoleons at least partly pro-Jewish policies;

rather, he associates him with Hannibal because both men had crossed the Alps with an army. This

seems to me an association somewhat artificially thought out after the event, and not a free

association. It would be nearer the mark to recall that Hannibal and Napoleon have often been

compared for their military genius, which was above all a matter of the extremely rapid movements

which allowed them to take the enemy by surprise. On Napoleons attitude to the Jews, see Lon

Poliakoff, Histoire de lantismitisme, III, Paris 1968, Ch II, 1.15 The best discussion of this point is in Erich Fromm,Sigmund Freuds Mission, New York 1972, Ch

VIII.16 My own views on this are given (together with references to those of earlier scholars) in The

Freudian Slip, pp. 176f, 18991, 204206, andpassim. I say that there seems to be a contrast because

Freud, although he saw very clearly the discontents and unhappiness of civilization, was always

convinced that this bourgeois civilization was the only civilization, to be defended at all costs, and that

psychoanalysis was an intellectually revolutionary doctrine destined to conserve oppression and inequality.17 Even in Freuds time, eminent historians (we need only mention Theodor Mommsen) were quite

rightly advancing the view that Hannibal had done well to reject Maharbals advice: so long as the

Italian confederation had not disintegrated, any direct attack on Rome would have turned out a costly

failure. School textbooks, however, such as Freud would have used as a boy, must still have spread the

notion (which goes back to Livy, XXII 51, 14) that, had Hannibal dared attack, Rome would have

fallen. They thus fostered the idea that he had been held back, not by rational strategic considerations,

but by a neurotic inhibition of his own. At bottom, Freud may have thought that Hannibal, like

himself but centuries earlier, had been the victim of a Roman phobia contrasting with his burning

wish to defeat Rome.

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particularly inhibited. On his journey of1897, it was when he arrived atthe shore of Lake Trasimene that Freud felt obliged to turn back; andit was at Trasimene that Hannibal had won, a year before Cannae, acrushing victory against the Romans (and then, too, some classicalsourcesfor instance, Livy XXII 8,7recount that he shrank fromlaunching an attack on Rome itself). On his way back, Freud wasalready hatching a plan for the following year, thinking he would by-

pass Rome . . . and travel to Naples. This, clearly, is an attempt tocheat the phobia, by treating Rome not as the too-much-longed-forgoal but as a mere staging-post, which might then provoke less tension.At the same time, the plan partly imitates Hannibals movements afterCannae, when, without of course passing through Rome, he went toCampania; and in this imitation we may trace Freuds premonitionthat he himself will fail to reach Rome. The Roman phobia arose,then, from an unconscious thought (of which Freud then becameconscious): What Hannibal never accomplished, I shall not accomplisheither. It was reinforced by his fear and hatred of Catholic Rome for itspersecution of the Jews, and fits into the framework of a more generalway of thinking: I have chosen the role of solitary hero, and am proudof it, but I feel that it is my destiny to be defeated.

Freud and his Father

When we come to discuss the interpretations of the Roman phobiagiven by some Freudians, we shall have occasion to note other aspectsof Freuds attitude to Rome. First, however, I should like to clear upthe question of whether the phobia can be traced to oedipal feelings of

hatred towards the father. This has been suggested by Marthe Robert,though her treatment is allusive rather than explicit, and she makeslittle of the properly sexual aspect of the relation to the father. (We shallsee, moreover, that her attempted explanation is altogether morecomplex.) Such an interpretation may seem plausible a priori. TheTraumdeutung, which contains the description and explanation of theRoman phobia, is, as we all know, Freuds most autobiographicalwork, and much of it stems from the self-analysis which he undertookfrom 1897 onwards (a fact also confirmed by the constant parallelsbetween the book and Freuds letters to Fliess). More specifically, Freudconsidered that the work had originated in feelings and reflectionsaroused in him by the death of his father: in his Preface to the secondedition (SE, IV, p. xxvi) he writes that the book was, I found, a portionof my own self-analysis, my reaction to my fathers deaththat is tosay, to the most important event, the most poignant, of a mans life.

Those words of traditional piety, speaking of his fathers death as thegreat grief of each mans life, cannot be taken altogether straightfor-wardly and literally, any more than the full state of Freuds mind can besafely inferred from the brief words of orbituary in which he breaks thenews to Fliess (2 November 1896). To be sure, Freud always expressedhimself in the most traditional manner as regards filial love andrespect,18 and it is this tradition which underlies the claim that it is the

18 Respect for the father, or for old age in general, old people being themselves paternal figures. Cf.

for example SE VI, p. 83: There are powerful internal punishments for any breach of the respect due

to age (that is, reduced to childhood terms, of the respect due to the father).

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fathers death, rather than the mothers, which causes the greatest grief.His teachings, however, tell a different story, stressing above all thehatred which the son feels towards the fatherbecause of sexualjealousy, and because he feels thwarted by the fathers repressiveauthoritarianismand according much less importance to love (whichflows from the need for protection and the desire for identification). Inthe oedipal situation, sorrow at the fathers death is not ruled out; but

it derives primarily, as is known, from remorse at having hated someonewhom, according to conventional morality, one should have loved. InTotem and Taboo, moreover, it will be seen to derive directly fromremorse over the murder of the father by the primitive horde.

Certainly it has been previously noted that, at the time of the letters toFliess and the writing of the Traumdeutung, the oedipal theory was stillevolving slowly in Freuds mind. I am less certain whether it has beenrecognized (probably it has; but I shall remark on it nonetheless, sinceit bears directly on my present argument) that, although in the fully

developed oedipal theory incestuous love of the mother and hatred ofthe father are connected and complementary, the two themes did notunfoldpari passu in Freuds thoughts. In some notes enclosed with hisletter to Fliess of31 May 1897, Freud writes that the wish for onesparents deaths plays a major part in neurotic illness, and goes on tospecify that in men this wish is focused on the father, in women on themother. He adds that sorrow at the death of ones parents is attributableto remorse for previous hatred. Here, the formulation of the oedipaltheory seems already quite advanced, though we should note that Freud

draws his observations, not from self-analysis, but from clinical practice(not that this can be attributed entirely to reticence: his observations onthe motherdaughter relationship could obviously have no basis inself-analysis). Writing to Fliess a few months later (34 October), Freuddoes draw on his self-analysis, recalling with great clarityalthough hissense of decorum obliges him to use a Latin phrasehow as a child hewanted to possess his mother, and remembering the circumstances inwhich this desire had made itself most strongly felt. But this timejealousy of the father is not invoked; indeed, it is ruled out. My fatherplayed no active role, wrote Freud of the origin of his own neurosis,

which he claimed was to be attributed instead to the sayings andbehaviour of an unattractive Catholic nurse, who was later even toprove herself a thief.

Only in the letter of15 October 1897, after saying something moreabout this same nurse, does Freud add: I have found love of the motherand jealousy of the father in my own case too (my emphasis). It seemsclear that jealousy of the father, unlike incestuous love of the mother,was not something which Freud discovered in the first place throughself-analysis. Rather, having observed itor believing he had observed

itin other people (his patients: see the first of the letters to Fliesswhich we have cited), he then found it (since he was searching for it)in himself. But this was not spontaneous and involved a certainstraining.

The fact is that Jakob Freud, to judge by his sons accountwhich inthis case is much better documented and interpreted by Marthe Robert,

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Ch. 1 and passim, than by Jones and other scholarsin no waycorresponded to the type of father who makes the oedipal situationseem credible. Whether the little boy is to love him as a protector anda model for emulation, or to hate him because of the fear inspired byhis forbidding authoritarianism and because he is a rival for possessionof the mother, the father of the Freudian account is at all events astrongtype of man. Now, as we have already seen, the young Freud was

indeed unable to approve of his father, but this was because he despisedhis weakness. His father was the resigned Jew who, in contrast to thefather of Hannibal, passively submitted to the insults of an overweeningChristian. Telling the story to his son, he did not even suspect that hisauthority and prestige as a father might suffer, but actually believed thatthe boy might take heart from the long-past episode, since if thesituation of the Jews was still not enviable, it was better than it hadbeen at the time when such bitter humiliations were commonplace.19

Then again, Jakob came from a family some of whom had beenmentally retarded, mad or epileptic (see the letter to Martha of 10February 1886), and was thus at least indirectly responsible for havingbrought into the world children, among them Sigmund, who werepredisposed to hereditary nervous ailments. He had abandoned JewishOrthodoxy, but had made no place for himself in the culture of histimes. Even the child in earliest infancy would be hard put to feel sexualjealousy towards such a father: hence Freuds remark in his earlier letterto Fliess, his delay and difficulty in noting the paternal element in hisoedipal complex.

No doubt Jakob Freud was indeed beloved by his son, though thiscannot have been the respectable sentiment professed in the Preface tothe second edition ofThe Interpretation of Dreams. Nor, however, can ithave been love either of a father-protector (Jakob being too weak togive his son such security) or of a father-model (emulate a humiliatedJew who had been made ashamed of his own Jewishness? Never!). Itwas, in the event, a love imbued with compassion for his fathersweakness. In the letter which he wrote to Fliess immediately after hisfathers death, and which we have already cited, Freud spoke of hisfathers mixture of deep wisdom and imaginative lightheartedness.

The wisdom is the ancestral wisdom of the persecuted and humiliatedJew, who nonetheless survives; the lightheartedness is surely close kinto that irony and self-irony which have given so many Jews someescape from their bitter lot, and underlay that plethora of much-lovedanecdotes and jokes which inspired his own book on Witz ( Jokes andtheir Relation to the Unconscious, SE, VIII). Nonetheless, even if he did notalways despise these sides of his fathers character, even if he understoodand indeed loved them in the manner we have just suggested, Freudwould certainly have preferred a strong father.20 In the course of a

dream which occurred after his fathers death, and to which Freud twicerefers in the Traumdeutung (SE, V, pp. 428, 447), Jakob Freud becomes an

19 Freud writes (SE IV, p. 197) that Jakob Freud told me a story to show me how much better things

were now than they had been in his days (that is, in the days of his youth).20Jakob Freuds comment, The boy will come to nothing, which he is supposed to have made when

his son committed some act of childish indecency (SE IV, p. 216), hardly entitles us to regard him as an

authoritarian father. Overall, he appears a mild and indulgent figure.

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eminent politician and resolves a dangerous crisis in Hungary; Freudalso recalls that his father, on his death bed, resembled Garibaldi, andthis makes him glad. Carl E. Schorske21 claims that this is a fatherrehabilitation dream. In reality, it is a dream reflecting a wish forthefathers rehabilitation; it confirms that Freud would have liked apugnacious and energetic political leader as a father.22 The resemblanceto Garibaldi may put one in mind of the fact (to which admittedly

Freud does not refer) that he, like Hannibal, tried in vain, in 1860 and1867, to conquer Rome. Those who are bent on proving Jakob Freudresponsible for his sons Roman phobia ought to restrict themselvesto the thesis that Jakob, by reason of his docile temperament, andnotwithstanding Freuds determination not to follow in his footsteps,had a demoralizing effect upon his son and undermined his faith that hemight become a hero like Hannibal. In the first place, however, thiswould have nothing to do with the neurosis-inducing influence of thefather in the oedipal situation; and secondly, Freuds demoralizationhad its origin, not in his fathers resignation in the face of abuse, butprecisely in the fact that defeat had overtaken the strong men (aboveall, Hannibal) with whom Freud had identified.

In an interview given in 1957 to Richard I. Evans, Jones depicts Jakobas a lively, happy man, a free thinker just like Freud (and he uses verysimilar expressions in his biography of Freud, which had just beencompleted). Just because they did resemble one another and enjoy thebest of relations, it must have been very difficult, Jones adds, for Freudto discover that there was a secret hatred of his father within himself.23

This portrait of Freuds father is in large measure false, for it exaggeratescertain aspects of his character while saying nothing of the profounddifferences and dissimilarities between him and his son. But, mistakenas his motives may have been, Jones too realizes that it would bedifficult to trace the idea of father-hatred to any source in Freuds self-analysis.

I believe, like many others, that while the motherson relation depictedin the oedipal situation has some basis (though I would prefer to speak,not of an incestuous relation, for this is a distortion, but of a profound

biological tie), the hatred of the father is an arbitrary biologisticgeneralization of a historical fact which has its roots in the patriarchalismof the traditional monogamous family. Ill-conceived from the start, thisnotion of Freuds degenerated further on being mythologized andprojected into humanitys prehistory in Totem and Taboo. Many commit-ted Freudian analysts today quite rightly reject this component ofFreuds teaching, or accept it only in limited form. But should we wishto know who provided the model for the father-figure in Freuds self-

21 Politique et psychanalyse dans l Interprtation des rves de Freud, inAnnales XXVIII (1973), p.

323f.22 Even in the dream itself, the rehabilitation is only partial: Freuds dream includes a memory of how

the dying man stained the bed-linen. This fact, then, which puts him in mind of deaths weakness and

squalor, at once breaks in to disrupt the image of his fatherGaribaldi.23 The reference is to p. 136f. of the Italian volume, C. G. Jung,Psicoanalisi o psicologia analitica? . . . con

una replica di E. Jones, Rome 1974. The latest edition of R. E. Evans, Conversations with Carl Jung . . .

(New York 1964) has been revised, and appears asJung on Elementary Psychology (London 1979): the

reactions of Jones, given in the earlier volume, are no longer included.

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analysis (or perhaps we should rather say, in his autobiography), wemust conclude, I believe, that it was not Jakob Freud, but SigmundFreud! He appears as an overweening castrating patriarch, not in hisrelations with his own children, but in the tyranny he exercised over hismale pupils (while with his female pupils he sustained quite different, ifsublimated, relationships); here, as Professor Sigmund Freud, hedestroys every trace they show of independent scientific personality,

and is quick to punish dissidentsexcommunicating them, expellingthem from the psychoanalytic community, hating them. The Laiuscomplex, as Devereux has aptly termed it, precedes the supposedOedipus complex, and is the most ignoble and hateful aspect (eventhough Freud himself certainly took no joy in it) of a personality wemust nonetheless call heroic, given the courage with which Freudresisted adversity and endured the appalling miseries of his illness in thelast years of his life.24 To return to our argument, however: in no way,except in the very indirect and non-oedipal sense which we havenoted, can Jakob Freud be held responsible for his sons Romanphobia.

The Meaning of Rome for Freud

A number of Catholics and Catholic sympathizers have attempted toshow that a repressed desire for conversion to the Catholic Churchunderlay the Roman phobia. The falsity of such reasoning has beenamply demonstrated by Jones (1, p. 19f), by Marthe Robert (p. 188,albeit with a captious theoreticism entirely unnecessary in the circum-

stances), and by Musatti.25

I shall not discuss it further here. It willemerge in the course of my subsequent argument that I view this pioushypothesis as being even more baseless than do the scholars to whomI have referred.

A second interpretation, which has been much more widely accepted,makes its first appearance in Jones (11, p. 20) and is later developed byMarthe Robert, especially in Chapters IIIVwith her usual intelli-gence and stylistic virtuosity, but also with the excessive esprit de finessewhich leads her to obscure the essential terms of a problem. As we shall

see, this interpretation, further developed, is also to be found inSchorske and in Musatti.

Freuds longing26 to visit Rome reflects, so these scholars argue, hisambivalence towards a place which he loved and hated with equal

24 Anyone who admires Freud, but wishes to keep their admiration this side of idolatry, must make a

distinction between the heroic and the mean and hateful aspects of his character as a man. It must also

be admitted, I believe, that while these two parts of his human personality were opposed, they were

nonetheless also complementary. Both had their source in a fundamental aggressiveness, which gave

Freud the strength to bear the hostility of men and of nature, but also prevented him from tolerating

any disagreement or having any respect for other peoples personalities.25 Musatti refers briefly to the Catholic interpretation in O IV, p. xi, expressing no view on it. In

Belfagor1980, p. 695f, he rejects it, however, decisivelyand rightly.26 Longing precisely renders Freuds word,Sehnsucht. The Italian edition (O III, p. 185) has nostalgia

(Italian nostalgia), which does correspond to one meaning ofSehnsucht, but is misleading in this context,

since it suggests a desire to return, a sense of missing ones home, which Freudas we shall shortly

seecould not have felt in respect of Rome. A few pages earlier, moreover (p. 183), the same word

Sehnsucht, in an altogether similar context, is correctly rendered as ardent wish (Italianardente desiderio).

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intensity. Jones states that (apart from the third Rome, the moderncapital of Italy) there are two Romes in Freuds mind: There is ancientRome, in whose culture and history Freud was deeply steeped, theculture that gave birth to European civilization . . . Then there is theChristian Rome that destroyed and supplanted the older one. This couldonly be an enemy to him, the source of all the persecutions Freudspeople had endured throughout the ages. Marthe Robert dwells at

length on this ambivalence. She calls attention to Freuds excellenteducation in the classics, to the contribution made to Greek and Latinstudies by German Jewish scholars, to the fact that Freud felt himself asmuch a part of modern European culture (the other side) as of Jewishtradition, to his taste for collecting antique works of art (it is not knownof what value or authenticity, but that hardly matters), and to hisdesirelinked to his quest of an academic career and a scientificreputationto be accorded full equality by the other side without,however, paying the price of a pretended Christian conversion.

All this is fair enough, but it leads Robert to overlook the point thatshe herself makes so well towards the end of Chapter II, where sheremarks that for Freud the Jewish and the European elements in hisbackground were not of equal status. The former were primary,instinctive, much more deeply rooted in his psyche; the latter weresomething he had acquired, and which had far less emotional signifi-cance for his underlying personality. Only in these terms can we explainwhat we have already noted and what Robert herself sets out clearly inChapter I: namely, the fact that Freud, though an atheist and not a

Zionist, felt himself engaged in single-handed combat with the institu-tions of the majority, a majority stronger than him (as it had beenstronger than Hannibal) both numerically and organizationally, butinferior to him in intellect and in morality; and the fact, also, that hewas convinced only a Jew could have founded psychoanalysis. Robert,moreover, like Jones, ascribes to Freud a passion for ancient Rome farbeyond what can legitimately be inferred from the evidence. DuringFreuds youth the intelligentsia of Europe, and especially of CentralEurope, admired Rome much less than Greece.27Jones, meanwhile, in

27 Jacob Bernays (an Orthodox Jew, and the uncle of Freuds future wife) was much more a Greek

scholar than a Latinist. Theodor Gomperz, whom Freud admired and who helped him in his academic

career, was a student of Greek philosophy. During the very period of his Roman phobia, Freud read

J. Burckhardts Griechische Kulturgeschichte, and also a biography of Schliemann (letter to Fliess, 21

December 1899). German-speaking intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt a

particular affinity, which they expressed in various ways, between Germany and ancient Greece.

Theodor Mommsen, one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, was never really able to appreciate

Latin culture and literature. It is true that when Latin studies revived, towards the end of the

nineteenth century, this was due largely to the work of German Jewish scholars (see Arnaldo

Momigliano,Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Rome 1960, pp. 420, 423). However, the

atmosphere of this revival was not one of patriotic or rhetorical partiality for Rome; rather, theRomans were admired for their ability to absorb Greek culture, which they had not slavishly imitated,

but had developed with an originality which freed them of any suspicion of native backwardness.

One great German Jewish Latinist, Eduard Norden, never quite freed himself of his tendency to

undervalue Latin literature. Only in the aftermath of the First World War did a rhetorical idealization

of Romewhose tones anticipated Nazismbegin to make itself heard (see Antonio La Penna, Orazio

e lideologia del principato, Turin 1963, pp. 1521). Of course, this whole theme deserves much fuller

treatment, and has in part been given it; however, I felt it necessary here to offer a caution against the

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his zeal to set up an opposition between an ancient Rome which Freudloved and a counter-Reformation Rome, which he detested, quiteforgets that the sworn enemy of Hannibal was none other than ancientRome!28

A careful reading of all the passages in which Freud refers to hisRoman phobia obliges us to state that he never speaks of feeling any

love of Rome. His longing to visit the city is the longing, not of alover, but of a conqueror bent on storming an enemy fortress. To besure, he never actually envisaged a military expedition, only a bloodlesstourist trip of the kind which he in fact made once the phobia had cometo an end. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the neurosis sprang from adesire for revenge and reparation (his desire to realize, as a Semite, theconquest of Rome which Hannibal had failed to achieve), and also fromfear that the compact majority would turn out, once again, to have theupper hand. There is no basis in reality for language such as Musattiuses when he writes (O, IV, p. 11) of a neurotic conflict between agreatlove of Rome and an invincible fear of the city.

Nor is there any hint of love for Rome in the dreams bearing on theRoman phobia which are recounted in the Traumdeutung.29 In some ofthem, the desire to reach Rome is expressed together with sorrow atfailing to do soso that these may be termed wish-fulfilment dreams,provided we note that the wish is already frustrated in the dream itself. Inothers, Rome figures as a persecutor, hated and feared. Before revealinghis identification with Hannibal, Freud narrates four of these dreams

(SE, IV, pp. 19496).

(a) Freud sees the Tiber and the Ponte S. Angelo from the window ofa train; but the train moves off before he is able to get out. No soonerhas he reached Rome, then, than it slips away from him.

(b) Someone takes him up a hill and points to Rome veiled in clouds,distant but at the same time clearly visible. Here again we have both thewish and the impossibility of its satisfaction. In this dream, Freud says,the theme of the promised land seen from afar was obvious (p. 194).

Freud is in fact identifying with Moses (and this is perhaps the first

tendency of Jones, and still more of Robert, to represent Freuds background as one in which no

distinction was made between an enthusiasm for Greece and an enthusiasm for Rome. It is also

noticeable that when, in later life, Freud developed a stronger interest in mythology, it was to the

Greek myths that, almost without exception, he turned. (Cf. the collective volume, Psychanalyse et

culture grecque, Paris 1980; a book, however, which promises more than it performs.) See also note 32,

below.28Jones ispartly, and only partly, justified in making use of this kind of chronological superimposition:

see our remarks above.29 I discuss these dreams only in terms of their relevance to the Roman phobia. Nonetheless, there is

a good deal of arbitrariness, and sometimes of absurdity, in the more detailed analyses which various

other scholars have made of them. Robert takes a few steps along this dangerous path, which is

followed to its very end by Didier Anzieu,Lauto-analyse de Freud et la dcouverte de la psychanalyse, Paris

1975. Anzieu thinks himself entitled, not to explain the dreams which Freud recounts, but to develop

them by way of a whole series of invented associations of which there is not the faintest trace in Freud.

He appears to have had the remarkable good fortune of bringing Freud back to life and putting him

through an analysis. (I am here making an internalcriticism: for my part, I am extremely doubtful about

the method of psychoanalysis, but in my view even those who believe in it firmly must reject Anzieus

procedures.)

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reference to the veritable obsession with Moses which would gripFreud throughout his life and lead him, decades later, to write The Mosesof Michelangelo and, finally, Moses and Monotheism). Once more, as withHannibal, he was identifying with a heroic Semitic fighter destinednever to reach his goal: God showed Moses the land of Canaan, butMoses died before he could set foot in it. Nor can the expressionpromised land be taken to imply a love of Rome. As Robert rightly

points out (p. 180), the land promised to the Jews was the habitation ofunknown and primitive idolators, steeped in superstition and doomed,for that reason, to be exterminated. In the same way, the land promisedto FreudMoses is enemy territory; Rome, just like Canaan before theJews arrived there, is promised as an object of conquest and a prize ofvictory (the most savage books of the Old Testamentare those whichtell how Joshua and his successors conquered Palestine: the Jewsmassacre entire peoples at the instigation of a vengeful God, in whoseeyes compassion towards the enemy is the gravest of sins, bringingterrible punishments in its wake). Freud, we might well say, feelstowards Rome a Mosaic hatred similar to his Hannibalistic hatred.This hatred was felt much more intensely at the unconscious level thanit was consciously, since for all his loathing of Rome as the persecutorof the Jews, Freud never entertained the remotest idea of carrying outany pogrom in reverse. However, it was precisely this deep-seatedparoxysm of unconscious hatred which, combined with his doubts as towhether he would be able to conquer the promised land, engenderedFreuds phobia.

(c) Freud thinks for a while that he is in Rome, but soon realizes that heis actually in Ravenna, which I have visited and which, for a time atleastduring the reign of the Emperor Honorius, in the fifth centurysuperseded Rome as the capital of Italy.30 As in the first dream,disillusionment follows swiftly upon illusion. By way of variousassociations which need not detain us here, Freud is put in mind of twoanecdotes about Jews in distress striving laboriously to reach theirdestination. Amidst various other non-Roman elements which makean appearance in this second part of the dream, we have once againwhat might be called a synthetic reference to the impossibility for the

Jewthe persevering but weak and vulnerable Jewof reachingRome.

(d) Once again Freud dreams he is in Rome, but realizes that he is inPrague. Here, together with disappointment because the goal has notbeen reached, there is, as Freud makes explicit, a feeling of insecurity,Prague being at that time a city hostile to the subject Germans of theAustrian Empire. There is alsoFreud is less explicit here, but thesupposition seems reasonable to mea memory of his first experience

of coming into contact with an anti-Semitic community, an experiencedating from Freuds childhood in Moravia (or deriving, we shouldperhaps rather say, from family conversations, for although he was bornat Freiberg, in Moravia, Freud moved when he was only three to

30 According to Anzieu (cf. preceding note), Ravennas attempt to supplant Rome, which ends in

failure, is a symbol of the sons attempt to supplant the father. (See my comments at the end of note

29. I quote from the Italian ed.,Lautoanalisi di Freud. . ., Rome 1976, I, p. 215.)

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Leipzig, and then to Vienna). Prague thus represents a double disadvan-tage: it is not Rome, but, like Rome, it is a hostile city; and Freud is noconqueror, but someone threatened by danger.

Still more striking is a dream recounted elsewhere in the Traumdeutung(SE, V, pp. 441f), which begins: On account of certain events which hadoccurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to remove the

children to safety, and this was done. As Freud himself explains (seealso p. 444), and as is in any case obvious, the dream reflects the Jewsanxiety, not only for himself, but even more so for his children, whoface a future of insecurity and persecution. But it is by no meansfortuitous that the dreams certain eventsmeasures of State, popularanti-Semitic agitation, threats of pogromtake place in Rome.Although at the time of Freuds youth Rome, despite the Popespresence, was one of the least anti-Jewish cities in the world, in whichJews ran no particular risks, for Freud it always remained the uncon-scious symbolic city of anti-Semitism. The rest of the dream takes placein Siena, a Siena linked and to some extent identified, by way ofconfused associations, with Rome (once again) and also with Babylonanother city hostile to the Jews, which was for them a place ofbanishment.

The Irony of Next Easter in Rome

A further attempt to link discussion of the Roman phobia with theidea of a love of Rome is based on certain passages in the letters toFliess which seem to suggest an equation of Rome with Jerusalem.(Jones dismisses this too hastily, in my viewsee 11, p. 19; but Musatti,when he takes it upO, IV, p. xif.does so with unhappy results.)Before he had overcome the phobia, Freud wrote repeatedly to Fliess(6 February and 27 August 1899, 30January 1901) that he wished tospend Easter in Rome, but had no confidence that he would be able todo so. Musatti notes that the Jews of the Diaspora used to greet eachother, at the end of the Passover period, with the phrase: Next year in Jerusalem!, even though no actual custom of visiting Jerusalem forPassover corresponded to the greeting, which had become a purely

symbolic evocation of the Jewish homeland. Musatti also claims(rightly, in my view) that Freud is alluding to this expression when hewrites in his letter to Fliess of14 April 1900: If I closed with NextEaster in Rome, I should feel like a pious Jew.*

Musatti concludes from this that Freud felt his journey to Rome to bea return to the fatherland, exactly equivalent to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This is verging on the absurd, for now, not content withstating that Freud had ambivalent feelings about Rome (which he hatedas a persecutor of the Jews and a symbol of the compact majority, but

loved because of its significance for the Western culture in which he felthe shared), Musatti would have us believe directly in a love of the city,a love not cultural, but ancestral. If we had time to waste on this kindof speculation, we might perhaps wish to attribute some such sentimentto a Jew like Graziadio Ascoli, the great linguist who endeavoured to

* In both German and Italian the same word can be used for Easter and Passover. ( Trs. note).

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establish that the Semites and the Indo-Europeans shared a commonorigin, and whose hypothesis of the Aryan-Semitic linkas he calleditwould thus have enabled him to declare himself, and every otherJew, to be related not only culturally but by bloodto the Romans. Buteverything that we have so far demonstrated indicates that in Freudsconsciousnessand still more so in his unconsciousthe sense of beinga Jew was felt at an altogether different level from the sense of being a

European.

My own view is that Freud uses these expressions about Easter withan ironic and paradoxical intention. This may be fairly straightforward:the devout Jew, the religious Jew which he was not and which healways insisted he was not, is thinking of spending Easter in the anti-Jerusalem itself. It may be more subtle and sarcastic: to go and spendEaster in the very heart of the enemy fortress would be, would it not,one more symbolic Jewish victory of the Hannibalistic type? A similarwitticism (drawing an analogy, this time, with Catholicism as well aswith Judaism) is to be found in an addition to the Traumdeutung madein 1925 (SE, IV, p. 194), and written long after the phobia had beenovercome: and thereafter I became a constant pilgrim to Rome.

It seems to me that Musatti, although, as we have seen in an earliersection, he quite rightly rejects the Catholicizing interpretation of theRoman phobia, falls victim to that very interpretation insofar as hetakes seriously Freuds remarks about Easter. The fact is that only aChristian can see Jerusalem and Rome as the two holy cities, and only

a Christian can equate them: such an equation is impossible for a Jew,whether religious or free-thinking, so long as he is proud of his ownJewishness. We had better watch out, or we shall find ourselves obligedto take seriously the addition to the Traumdeutung which we have justquoted, and we shall be convinced that Freud overcame his phobia themoment he was able to see his journey to Rome as a Catholicpilgrimage!

A passage from the Traumdeutung which is certainly of interest, but ofwhich Schorske (see note 21 above) has made too much, as has Marthe

Robert (who follows him too far, though not the whole way), concernsa reminiscence which came into Freuds mind just before he recognizedthat the cause of his phobia lay in his identification with Hannibal. Thereminiscence was of a few lines from one of our classical authors (later,in 1925, Freud thought that he had read them in Jean-Paul Richter, buthe was not certain of this and did not try to find the passage):31 Whichof the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the

31 SE IV, p. 196, n.l: The author in question must no doubt have been Jean Paul. However Freuds

German (Gesammelte Werke, II/III, p. 202, n.l) reads: Der Schriftsteller, bei dem ich diese Stelle las,muss wohl Jean Paul gewesen sein; and wohl, in such a context, means likely rather than no

doubt. So far as I know, the phrase has not been found in Jean Pauls works. Winckelmann was

Vice-Principal (Konrektor) of the Gymnasium at Seehausen from 1743 to 1748. He did not go to

Rome immediately at the end of this period, but was first occupied for some time at Dresden, as a

librarian (cf. Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Genossen, Cologne 1956, I, p. 137f). Since it was at

Dresden that he received the invitation to go to Rome, and was converted to Catholicism, Jean Paul

condenses matters very considerably in his account.

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greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to RomeWinckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-Chief? (SE, IV, p. 196). The phrase is ironic and precisely for thatreason its meaning is not clear, even in the German (Es ist fraglich, wereifriger in seiner Stube auf und ab lief, nachdem er den Plan gefasst, nach Romzu gehen, der Konrektor Winckelmann oder der Feldherr Hannibal: GesammelteWerke, 11/111, p. 202). We may certainly imagine Freud, and perhaps also

the author of the words which he records, marking the contrast betweenthe two figures. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great archaeologistand historian of ancient art, willingly and without any disturbance tohis conscience or evidence of real religious feeling converted fromProtestantism to Catholicism, solely in order to obtain, at Rome, thepost first of Librarian and later of Keeper of Antiquitieswhichenabled him to pursue his study of Greek art. Hannibal, bent onentering Rome as the avenging conqueror, never in fact arrived there.We may also (tentatively!) conjecture that Freud gave some thought tothe price paid by a Jewish intellectual unwilling, as he was, to gothrough a pretended conversiona price paid, at that time, not inoutright persecution but in obstacles to ones career, hostile receptionof ones ideas, and so on. At all events, Freudto go back to the linesin questionfollowed the example of Hannibal and not of Winckel-mann. Here, I think, we must call a halt if we are not to indulge innovel-writing, either by presenting Freud as deeply torn between loyaltyto Judaism and love (yet again) of Rome, or by exaggerating out of allproportion the similarities between Winckelmann and Freud and thusattributing to the latter a dramatic, barely repressed leaning to

Winckelmannism.32

Obsessive Preparations as an Index of Anxiety

None of this psychologism allows either Jones, or Robert, or any of theother scholars with whose work I am acquainted to arrive at anorthodox Freudian explanation of Freuds phobia as based in infantilesexuality. Jones must have thought along these lines (see the accountbelow), but he remains reticent. It is Musatti, in fact, who offers theexplicitly orthodox explanation (O, IV, pp. xxiii, and Belfagor, 1980, p.

695f).33 Rome, he says, represented for Freud the alma mater, thesymbol of the mother herself; thus the Roman phobia is the fear of

32 Both Schorske and (to a lesser extent) Robert are afflicted by a Winckelmannian enthusiasm which

leads them to disregard several facts. They might have discovered, not only in Justis classic biography

(see previous note), which they cite, but in any encyclopaedia, that (1) Winckelmann wanted to go to

Rome, and went there, not because he loved things Roman, but because he loved Greek art, many of

whose monuments were to be found in Rome and in Campania. His glory is that the discovery of

Greek art (which he knew, for the most part, through copies of the Roman period), and of Greek

civilization in general, owes much to the impetus he gave to classical scholarship and to German

neo-humanism; his limitation is that, since he regarded the Greek ideal of beauty as an absolute, he

had little understanding of whatever did not conform with that ideal; and (2) Rome was an especiallyfavourable site for the study of ancient art, but, in the eighteenth century, it was certainly not the

centre of European civilization: a far higher level had been reached in France, England, Holland and

in Germany itself. Reckless pursuit of an analogy with Freud should not lead us to make Winckelmanns

going to Rome and his opportunistic conversion to Catholicism into the paradigm of a passage from

a backward, enclosed culture into a more advanced one.33 Anzieu (independently, it seems, of Musatti, and more briefly than him) offers a few hints: see the

Italian ed. cited above, I, pp. 209, 234.

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incest. Thus, at last, quod non fecit Freudus, fecit Musattus: Hannibal, thecompact majority, the hatred for Rome as persecutor of the Jews,were all masking a truth which motives of discretion disinclined Freudto confess.

Many of my reasons for regarding this explanation as absurd havealready been given in the course of my argument, and others will appear

in what follows. Rome was not a forbidden love, as Musatti claims; itwas hated (still more hated, as we have seen, at the level of theunconscious!) and desired as an object of conquest, while yet beingfeared because it was hated.34 I am well aware that, if one abuses thenotion of ambivalenceas Freud, himself, often did, elsewhereeverything can be interpreted as the opposite of everything. One canargue that an element of aggression is present in every love, and thatFreuds desire to reach Rome, simultaneously aggressive and frustratedas it is, therefore symbolizes a repressed desire to possess the mother.All such conjuring tricks, however, designed to confirm a preconceivedhypothesis, seem to me unworthy of anyone who truly wishes to explainor to gain knowledge. Moreover, nothing that Freud ever said or wroteallows us (if it did, Musatti would know of it) to think that Romefigured in any way as analma materfor him. This symbolism belongs tothe idealization of all things Roman:35 we might expect it from anItalian nationalist, or even from a German affected by the Romanismwidespread in Germany after the First World War (see note 27 above),but not from Freud or his circle. The fact that Freud, before he hadmanaged to overcome the phobia, spent a long while, in Vienna,

consulting a map of Rome (letter to Fliess, 23 October 1898), is so littlea proof of Musattis thesis that Musatti himself, without commentingon his change of opinion, provides two different explanations of it, theone worse than the other, separated by a gap of ten years. Having oncediscerned in the incident a symbolic expression of the childs sexualcuriosity and his impulse to explore his body (O, IV, p. xiii), he writesin Belfagor(1980, p. 695)probably because his previous explanationseems to him to take too little account of incestuous desirethat Freudpored over the map of Rome as a man might gaze at the portrait, or

34 There are no grounds whatever for the distinction which Schorske wants to set up between la

Rome de Freud enfant . . .rebarbative, hostile, bureaucratique, and the Rome which Freud

wished to visit during the 1890s: The former is an object of hatred, an enemy to be conquered, the

second is an object of desire, with which one falls in love (la premire est un objet de haine, ennemi

conqurir, la seconde est un objet de dsir dont on tombe amoureux: see Schorske, p. 318). But did

not the Hannibalic inhibitions, even though Freud traced them to sources in his childhood and

adolescence, continue to disturb him and to block his path until 1901? And does the contrast which

he draws between himself and the compact majority not recur, as we have seen, in writings of1925

and 1926? See also the discussion below of Freuds impressions when he finally managed to reach

Rome.35 The image, the conception, is of more importance than the form of words. Since there is, however,

a link between them, it is perhaps worth observing that the expressionalma materas a designation ofRome appears nowhere, not only in the Freudian texts, but in ancient Latin writings. Only very late,

in the Imperial period, is Rome regarded and venerated as a goddess; and when this does begin to

happen, it is only very rarely referred to by the epithet mater(oralma, without the mater), which is not

found except in authors of the latest Imperial period. An overall view of these questions is given by F.

Ritter, in Roscher,Ausfhrliches Lexikon der griechischen und rmischen Mythologie, IV, 13off; Thesaurus

Linguae Latinae, I, 1704, 58f, and 65; VIII, 445ff. The epithetalma (and also mater) is, however, often

used in reference to Cybebe and Cybelle (the Magna Mater), to the Earth, and to Venus.

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re-read the letters, of the woman he loves. I believe that the explanationis quite different: in the case of any desire to realize an ambition(whether to complete a journey, to write a book, or whatever), themore it is blocked or delayed by inhibitions, the more detailed the plansand interminable the preparations to which it gives rise. When one isfailing to do something, there is no more obvious self-justification thanthe plea: I must prepare myself more fully. Those who make the most

detailed and exhaustive consultations of railway timetables, road mapsor tourist guides are those who never make up their minds to leave, ordo so only with difficulty and anxiety. Suetonius (Tib. 38) has left us anamusing account of the Emperor Tiberiuss fear of travelling: everyyear, once he had declared his intention to visit the imperial provinces,all possible preparations were made for the journey, and prayers wereoffered up to the gods for his safe conduct both by himself and byothers on his behalf; and in the end, he always remained at Rome, orundertook only the shortest trips. Freuds repeated consultations of themap of Rome were a way of saying to himself: Ive not given up theidea of going; but I shall go there only when I have equipped myselfbeforehand with a knowledge of the citys topography, so that I can goanywhere in complete safety. Similarly, the surest way of not writing abook is to continue indefinitely with the planning and amassing ofmaterial for it (as do those authors whom we call perfectionists); andthe surest way not to make a revolution is to take the greatest pains inpreparing for it, as did the German Social Democrats before WorldWar I; and we could give further examples. Symptoms of anxiety, ofvarying but broadly similar kinds, continued to afflict Freud for a long

time afterwards (in regard to travelling in general, not specifically toRome): Jones (1, pp. 335f) says that he retained in later life relics ofitthat is, of his fear of travellingin being so anxious not to miss atrain that he would arrive at a station a long whileeven an hourbeforehand.

Freud in Rome

We shall return shortly to other supposed confirmations of theincestuous interpretations of the Roman phobia. First, however, itseems appropriate to take a look at Freuds reactions when finally, inSeptember 1901, he managed to reach Rome. In the letter to Fliess (19September 1901), which contains his first impressions of the city, Freuddistinguishes in his judgements between the three Romes. Contempor-ary Rome, he finds hopeful and likeable (we have noted that after thefounding of the Italian nation there were no further significant out-breaks of anti-Semitism). Papal Rome, he found he could not freelyenjoy for he remembered too bitterly how the Church had persecutedthe Jews (and this is further proof of the mistakenness of the incestuous

interpretations, which take those elements which relate to FreudsJewishness to be a mere screen for the truth of the Roman phobia).Ancient Rome, he found beautiful and was able to contemplateundisturbed. We have already had occasion to note that the oppositionHannibalAncient Rome had long since been transmuted into theopposition HannibalPapal Rome, and this explains why Freudsjudgement on ancient Rome is not hostile. All the same, it is not nearly

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as eulogistic as Jones, Robert, and above all Schorske36 would have usbelieve, although it is followed, in the same letter to Fliess, by anexpression of great admiration (tempered with a measure of irony) forthe temple of Minerva, and although other letters give further evidenceof his pleasure in Roman works of art. But nothing in their tonesuggests a man who has been reunited with hisalma mater.

Certainly, Freud was overjoyed to have arrived in Rome (as we learnfrom the letter to Fliess just cited), even if, as he hastens to add, thefulfilment of his long-cherished wish was slightly disappointing, as allsuch fulfilments are when one has waited for them too long. His joy,however, sprang not from love, but from his having conquered hisphobia. He had done so, moreover (as is clear from the letters, and alsofrom an additional note of1909 to the Traumdeutung, SE, IV, p. 194),without having to overcome excessive inhibitions, and even withoutany feara marvellously happy outcome of all his earlier anxieties.

Anyone with any knowledge of neurosis, which need not be that of thepsychiatrist but may be that of a victim, knows that agoraphobia, forexample, can be overcome in a variety of ways. One may succeed incrossing a public square, but only at the cost of palpitations, tremors,disorientation, terror of being unable to hold out to the far side;alternatively, one may enjoy an unexpected remission of the neurosis,and cross the square without noticing any unpleasant feelings. In thefirst case, the victory is in truth a defeat, for the price paid is too highand will discourage further attempts: the phobia might admittedly haveled to worse things (a sense of vertigo causing its victim to collapse in

mid-course, an irresistible impulse to turn back after the first falteringsteps), but it has been exacerbated. In the second case, by contrast, wecan speak of victory properly so called, a victory which is usuallytemporary but sometimes proves permanent (in which event we speaknot of a remission but of a spontaneous cure, although it frequentlyhappens that, when one particular phobia disappears, another takes itsplace: the symptoms change, but the neurosis persists). The ending ofthe Roman phobia must have been of this type: a spontaneous cure, orat least a spontaneous disappearance of this one symptom, since Freudremained a neurotic all his life. Hence his joy, which immediately led

him to comment on his own success in terms which, for a psychiatrist,seem rather casual and superficial, not to say laconic: it only needs alittle courage (SE, IV, p. 194). Even Jones, inclined as he is to acceptwithout demur whatever Freud may say, adds a parenthetical note ofexclamation in reporting this remark.

Naturally, that Freud was cured of his Roman phobia implied neither(as we have seen) that he ceased to hate Rome for having persecutedthe Jews, nor that he ceased to admire Hannibal. It implied only the

cessation or attenuation of the neuropathological, even psychopathol-ogical, disposition which had led Freud to an identification withHannibal so extreme that he had become incapable (in a wholly differentsituation) of achieving what his Semitic hero of old had found

36 Art. cit. p. 327: Seule la Rome de lantiquit le plongea dans un profond enthousiasme. See also the

distinction which we draw a little below between admiration for Rome, and joy at having arrived

there.

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impossible, and had made contemporary Rome the concentrated symbolof every oppression which the Jews had suffered at the hands ofChristians. Musatti and others draw attention to several circumstanceswhich they consider pertinent: the end of Freuds self-analysis and hisconsequent feeling of subjective freedom, the weakening and finalbreak-up of his friendship with Fliess (like many of Freuds dealingswith other people, this was an unpleasant episode, but Freud, we must

note, experienced it as a relief), and above all his decision to relax hisown strict principles a little, not indeed by converting to Christianity,but by allowing his allies to intrigue a little on his behalf in connectionwith the university professorship he was seeking.37 All these circum-stances can be considered as in part auxiliary causes of the overcomingof the Roman phobia, and in part consequences of its being overcome,which then further strengthened his sense of security. There was also aJewish motive which heightened Freuds pleasure at being in Rome,both during this first trip and still more so during the following journeyof September 1912. This was his interest in the Moses of Michelangelo,which reawakened in acute, pathological form his identification withMoses: for pathological one must call it, in view of Freuds daily trips,during his 1912 visit, to Michelangelos statue, on which he gazed inorder to decipher its secret (see his letter to Marthe of25 September1912). Thus in place of the Roman phobia was substituted another, ittoo consisting in an identification with a great Semitic leader who,according to Freuds interpretation, had suffered a severe setback (theinsubordination of his people) and had barely managed to restrainhimself.

The Sexual Interpretation and the Athenian Phobia

Various analogies have been invoked in support of the incestuousinterpretation of the Roman phobia; none of them, however, is to mymind consistent with it.

First Jones (II, p. 21, although, as we have noted, he refrains from anyexplicit statement of its incestuous nature), and later Robert andMusatti, draw attention to two notes added in 1911 and 1914 to a

passage of the Traumdeutung (SE, V, p. 398). Discussing incestuousdreams, Freud here draws upon an article of1910 by Otto Rank andmentions three tales, deriving from ancient sources, of incestuousdreams relating to Caesar, to Brutus and the Tarquinii, and to Hippias,the exiled Athenian tyrant. The first and the third were supposed tohave dreamt of lying with their mothers, dreams interpreted asforetelling future dominion (in Caesars case, over the whole world,that is, over the earth, mother of us all; in Hippiass, over his Athenianhomeland, to which he would make a victorious return). The Tarquinii

37 It is Schorskes one merit that he insists on the importance of this more relaxed attitude which Freud

took towards himself. However, he is quite wrong (and his tone, moreover, is a little irritating: Freud,

he implies, at last gave up his hermit-like ways, and learned to live in the world!) to exaggerate this

factor in Freuds cure, to the point where he makes it the sole cause. We are supposed to see the Freud

of the period after 1901 as nothing but a man of science, indifferent to the Jewish question, to the

political organization of the psychoanalytic movement, and to all other such matters. Such a

perspective makes it more than ever impossible to understand Freuds last years, from Totem and Taboo

toMoses and Monotheism.

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were said to have received from the Delphic oracle a prophecy thatwhichever of them first embraced his mother would become ruler ofRome, but Brutus supposedly forestalled them by immediately kissingthe earth, symbol of motherhood. Other analogous dreams are attestedto by classical authors, and Artemidorus, in his still extant work on TheInterpretation of Dreams, which dates from the second century BC, devotesa chapter (1 p. 79) to dreams of mother-incest, classifying them

according to a complex casuistry, and considering some to be of goodand others of evil omen; and he too remarks on the symbolic equivalencemotherearth and motherhomeland.38 However, and apart from thefact that Freud makes no connection between these dreams and hisRoman phobiaa silence which one might attribute to his censor-shipthe dreams related here lack the element of inhibition, and thusof phobia: the incest dream is taken without more ado to betoken goodfortune (Hippias and Brutus interpreting their own dreams, withoutrecourse to soothsayers), and is seen as an encouragement to seekdominion over the homeland; and no neurotic fear of incest obstructsthe achievement of that goal.39 The situation, therefore, is completelydifferent, and Freuds own comment is made in seeming unawareness ofthe neurotic problems induced by love of the mother (I have foundthat people who know that they are preferred or favoured by theirmother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and anunshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bringactual success to their possessors).40 As if this were not enough, thescholars whom we have cited have forgotten, once again, that for FreudRome was neither a homeland nor a venerated mother Earth, but a

hostile and menacing city.

Musatti maintains that the sexual interpretation of the Roman phobiacan find support in a sort of Athenian phobia (the expression is myown) which Freud experienced some years later, in 1904, and of whichhe speaks in a very beautiful piece of writing dating to 1936, A

Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis (SE, XXII, pp. 23948). Freud, whowas accompanied by his younger brother Alexander, no sooner arrivedon the Acropolis than he had a feeling of dual personality. One part ofhis Ego was saying to itself: What I see is not realthe Acropolis

does not exist, and I am not standing on the Acropolis. The other partwas justifiably astonished at such incredulity, and indeed had theopposite feeling, a sense ofdj vu at being in a place already familiar (p.241).

38 Cf. Artemidorus, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica), trans. with commentary by Robert J.

White, Park Ridge, Noye Press, 1975, p. 61f and p. 81, n. 97. See also the Introduction to Artemidorus,

Il libro dei sogni, Milan 1975, pp. xii ff.39 There is no doubt that the ancient Greeks mostly regarded incest as a great impiety; however, there

is evidence that this prohibition was sometimes challenged, and that a less severe attitude was

sometimes taken towards it. This is denied by Eric R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley

1951, Chs. II and VI), but some of the passages which he cites contradict his own thesis.40 It should not be overlooked that the Freud who added these notes was in many respects a different

man from the author of the first edition of the Traumdeutung. He had come to give ever greater

credence to the symbolic value of myths and even to the veracity of prophecies, auguries and so on.

His rationalism was continually yielding fresh ground to irrational impulses. What is more, he forgot,

when he attributed a true psychological insight to these ancient interpretations of prophetic dreams,

that Hippias never actually succeeded in returning to his homeland, as his dream of incest had promised

him he would: the Persians were defeated, and Hippias did not return to rule over Athens!

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Here, too, Freud refers to childhood memories, although once againthey are not sexual, and do not go back to his earliest years. While aschoolboy, he had obviously never had any doubts about the existenceof the Athenian Acropolis; but he had despaired of ever visiting it. Thislack of confidence persisted even as he was travelling to Athens,becoming especially strong after they had passed Trieste: Freud and hisbrother

timpanaro roman phobia

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