I am quite calm and very curious about how the dear Lord is going to bring us together again.22 [In this letter of March 1885, Freud was in an atypical confident mood.]
…and God was on their side. (Letter 85) [“Their” refers to the Biblical patriarchs.]
Thank God it’s over. (Letter 94)
These references to God, even if just “figures of speech,” were typically made in contexts where they were far from required by the sense of the topic. In addition, these expressions almost always conveyed considerable affect. Only in a pre-Freudian mentality can they be considered as “unimportant”; it was Freud himself who taught us to take such things seriously.
It is the specifically Christian nature of Freud’s interests and preoccupations that is of the greatest relevance to us. Let us begin by looking at Freud’s references to Whitsunday, or Pentecost.23 At the end of a lengthy letter, written on May 29, 1884, he concluded as follows:
Fond Pentecost greetings, darling. What memories this season brings back—precious, lovely ones, and some bitter ones as well. If only you had stayed here! Your leaving will cost me part of my life. I shall be with you for your birthday, after all.
Once more, a fond Pentecost greeting fromYourSigmund24
The holiday of Pentecost, usually occurring in May, is of course distinctly Christian, and is seldom referred to outside of its religious significance. (Pentecost is the day that marks the descent of the Holy Spirit to the early Christian community—the Apostles, Mary, and the faithful—50 days after Easter.) In Catholic Moravia, Pentecost was a most important holiday, in some respects rivaling Easter.25 Since Pentecost was also celebrated throughout the Austrian Empire, it inevitably became a fact of life for everyone, Christian or not. But Freud’s reference here was far from a simple factual one; instead, it was quite emotional and fervent. Twice, he explicitly extended “fond Pentecost greetings” to Martha. For a secular Jew to have written this to his decidedly Jewish fiancée is most peculiar indeed. One also notes in the passage in question that Freud referred to memories in such a way as to suggest a more distant time than merely the two years during which Freud had been engaged to Martha. (Freud presumably experienced Pentecost with his Czech nanny.) The concern with separation, combined with “precious, lovely…and some bitter” memories, can, I believe, be best understood as a redintegration of Freud’s association of the season of Pentecost with the loss of his nanny