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I asked my mother whether she remembered my nurse. “Of course,” she said, “an elderly woman,
very shrewd indeed. She was always taking you to church. When you came home you used to preach,
and tell us all about how God conducted His affairs. At the time I was in bed when Anna was
being born” (Anna is two-and-a-half years younger) “she turned out to be a thief, and all the
shiny Kreuzers and Zehners and toys that had been given you were found among her things. Your
brother Philipp went himself to fetch the policeman, and she got ten months.”75
This passage tells us why the nanny was dismissed, but not exactly when it happened. Read carefully, it can mean that when Amalia was home in bed with the newborn Anna, Sigmund would come home and preach. This was Christmas time — December 25 through January 6 — and there would have been much in the church services to interest a child at this season. Then the letter says, “she turned out to be a thief.” The expression is ambiguous and implies that at some unspecified later date, she turned out or was discovered to be a thief. It certainly does not necessarily mean that she was so discovered on or about December 31. Another thing to remark about this passage’s seeming to link December 31, 1858, with the nanny’s dismissal is that although Freud was putting it in quotes, he was of course recalling a conversation with his mother. Thus the whole passage was a reconstruction of the original conversation. This conversation could easily have covered two separate ideas, the first being young Sigmund’s coming home to preach to his mother (who was, for the time being, regularly at home in the week or two after Anna’s birth), the second being “she turned out to be a thief.” It would be natural in a reconstruction to have put these two ideas together, or even to have misunderstood that the mention of the discovery of the nanny’s stealing right after the mention of his coming home to preach implied that the two events occurred at the same time. It is relevant to note in this case that Amalia Freud was in her early 60s and recalling things that had happened almost 40 years before.76 There is also some good psychological evidence, based on one of Freud’s memories, that places the nanny’s dismissal in the late spring or early summer of 1859. It is now well established that Siegfried Bernfeld has conclusively proved that Freud’s Screen Memories essay was an autobiographical report.77 In this paper, Freud described the following scene: I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadowland, green and thickly grown, in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers…. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage and in front of the cottage door two women are standing … a peasant-woman with a handkerchief on her head and a nursemaid. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the two others are my boy cousin, who is somewhat older, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. We are picking the yellow flowers…. The little girl has the best bunch; and, as though |