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Holt focuses on the comment that the nanny washed young Sigmund in reddish water. Most people,
when asked about this remark, interpret it to mean that Freud was somehow washed in water
that had been colored by the nanny’s menstrual blood; in other words, that this was literally
water in which she had previously washed herself. Such an interpretation, however, opens up
much more of a mystery than it solves. For, as Holt observes, why on earth would she have done
such a thing? If one judges by contemporary attitudes of women somewhat comparable to this
Moravian peasant, such an action seems extremely unlikely. It seems improbable that a pious
Catholic woman, whose personal habits recommended her for a job of child care, would have
allowed a little boy to get “contaminated” by her menstrual blood; menstrual blood is commonly
considered unclean by simple people, and taboo for males.
Instead, Holt proposes. that what Freud was reporting was a conflation of two sets of associations to blood: menstrual blood, and baptism as being “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Freud may indeed have had memories of seeing reddish water in which his nanny had washed herself. Remember that this was in the days before sanitary napkins, when the problem of menstruation for women was a far messier one than it is today: Rags were used, washed out, and reused. Generally they were left to soak in the bathroom in containers of cold water. All this may well have aroused intense curiosity in little Sigmund. But Freud might also have another set of memories — of having been secretly baptized. And part of the explanation would have been that he was told that he had been “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” as the nanny had been herself. They had been washed in the same water, which was also the blood of the Lamb.94 Freud’s associations in this letter add support to this view. just prior to his remark about the reddish water, he referred to the skull of a “little sheep”; a little sheep, of course, is a lamb. A skull is also often associated with the crucifixion of Christ, since it took place on Golgotha, which means “the place of a skull.”95 Many paintings of the crucifixion represent this with a skull somewhere on the ground near the foot of the cross. A few sentences later, Freud used the expression experimenta crucis — that is, “the test of the cross” — to suggest that the memory of the reddish water was not a fantasy, but, rather, derived from an actual early experience. All of this implies that when he wrote that his nanny washed him in “water in which she had previously washed herself,” Freud was referring to his covert baptism.96 It is worth pointing out, with respect to this interpretation, two things: First, the idea that Christ is “the Lamb of God who washes away the sins of the world” is a basic concept in Christian thought, repeated daily in the liturgy of the Mass. Second, and more specifically, a great deal of popular piety in the 19th century was deeply preoccupied with blood. |