Don QuixoteThere are still other significant connections between Freud, in his adolescent pre-university days, and religion. The appeal of Don Quixote—what Gedo and Wolf call its “deep personal significance”68—was not just due to Cervantes’s psychological insights and humor, but must also have derived from the religious atmosphere that suffuses the narrative. This is no modern tale debunking religious belief or ideals, nor is it notably hostile to the Church. In spite of its comic representation of chivalry and of chivalric ideals, at the heart of the work is a great reverence for Don Quixote and for the ideals that he embodies. There was obviously something of the knight-errant in the young Freud’s self-image, and (as Gedo and Wolf point out) his frequent references to his fiancée as “princess” had their origin in Don Quixote.69 No doubt the ambivalent way in which Cervantes treated knight-errantry made it attractive to Freud; as in all things religious, ambivalence was Freud’s dominant attitude. Freud remarked about Don Quixote: Don’t you find it very touching to read how a great person, himself an idealist, makes fun of his ideals?…[once] we were all noble knights passing through the world caught in a dream, misinterpreting the simplest things, magnifying commonplaces into something noble and rare, and thereby cutting a sad figure.…we men always read with respect about what we once were and in part still remain.70 Silberstein and Fluss LettersThere are surprisingly numerous references to things religious in Freud’s rather lengthy correspondences with Edward Silberstein and Emil Fluss, written when Freud was 16 and 17. Silberstein was a schoolmate and pen pal; Fluss was a young friend living in Freud’s boyhood town, Freiberg, with whom he corresponded between 1872 and 1874. Gedo and Wolf, in another article “The ‘Ich’ Letters”, brought these still mostly unpublished letters to my attention.71 For example, Freud referred in the Silberstein letters to his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841/1957), a well-known and influential critique of Christianity.72 In this work, Feuerbach (1804-1872), a left-wing Hegelian, wrote as follows: [The historical progress of religion consists in this: that which during an earlier stage of religion was regarded as something objective is now recognized as something subjective, so that which was formerly viewed and worshipped as God is now recognized as something human…. God is merely the projected essence of Man.73 |