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is particularly relevant: “The ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.”6 Certainly, the
first, and in many respects the only, abandoned cathected person (lost object of love) for Freud was his nanny,
and thus the earliest development of his own ego would have come out of this experience — coping with his grief over the
loss of his functional mother, and of the surrounding Freiberg environment. Bowlby’s evidence shows that such childhood
sorrow can often have life-long consequences, and that defensive processes are a regular response to mourning
at all ages: “In infants and children, it appears, defensive processes once set in motion are apt to stabilize
and persist.”7
Ricoeur well characterizes the Freudian notion of the ego as the result of the psychological work of mourning. That is, as Freud saw it, mourning or sorrow is the underlying emotion of the ego, and the ego itself is developed through the need to adapt to the loss of the objects (primarily people) that have been loved. Ricoeur expands on this further by pointing out that Freud’s theory “brings absence into the very make-up of the ego,” and that “it is impossible to separate the ego’s coherence and structural autonomy from the work of mourning without also abandoning the peculiar field of speech in which psychoanalysis operates.”8 One of the essential characteristics of Freud that is elaborated throughout Chapter Three is his underlying mood of sorrow-his pervasive pessimism and lack of joy. This feeling originated in the loss of his nanny and the lost “Eden” of Freiberg; because of the nanny’s religious significance, Freud’s sorrow, bitterness, and longing were all intermixed with Christianity. The religious situation in Vienna, according to Jones, was that Freud’s parents were “secular Jews” who maintained little Jewish observance in the home. “It is certain that in practice they were free-thinking people.”9 This interpretation is something of an overstatement. For example, one of Jakob’s grandchildren has reported: It was not a pious household but I do remember one Seder at which 1, as the youngest at the table, had to make the responses to the reading of the song about the sacrifice of the kid: I was greatly impressed by the way grandfather recited the ritual, and the fact that he knew it by heart amazed me.10 Hence, the Passover Seder was certainly celebrated in Jakob Freud’s household, at least some of the time.11 Reuben Rainey reports. There is no information concerning the family’s synagogue attendance or Sabbath observance in the home.… Rosh Hashona, Yom Kippur, Pasach and Purim were observed in the household as late as 1874, when Freud was in his second year of medical studies.12 Jones writes that the Freud family did not observe the Jewish dietary laws, and there is no reason to think otherwise.13 |