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been passed on by Freud to people in Vienna, who subsequently published on the topic without acknowledging Fliess.74 (Academics will understand this rage.) Sulloway has also shown that Freud’s intense rivalry with Fliess underlay his failure to acknowledge the many contributions of his friend and colleague from Berlin.75
But Sulloway’s primary contribution is to document thoroughly the particular scientific sources of much of Freud’s philosophy and general scientific attitude. Freud’s rationalism, his determinism, and his assumption that the mind is ultimately physical (or, rather, physiological) came from such great scientific theorists as Darwin, Romanes, Helmholtz, Brücke, Fechner, and others.76 We should never lose sight of the fact that Freud was operating in a medical environment, where biological science, Darwinian theory, and good medical practice were the common models from which one approached an understanding of the mental life. (The other and, I argue, even more fundamental source of influence on Freud’s ideas and “philosophy” was, in fact, literature. This argument is taken up in Chapter Four.) The correspondence between Fliess and Freud—particularly the letters of Freud—is well known as being of great historical importance for the origin of psychoanalysis; in a somewhat censored form, the letters have been available for years.77 They have already been frequently cited here, as they constitute the primary source on Freud’s childhood memories. In the letters, he discussed his recovery of the memory of his nanny, of his baby brother’s death, and of various other topics already examined. A major new theme occurred in the critical last five years of the correspondence, 1897-1902. This theme—or pair of linked themes—was that of Rome and Easter. Freud first wrote of Rome to Fliess on December 3, 1897: “1 dreamt I was in Rome…the Rome of my dreams was really Prague…the dream had fulfilled my wish to meet you in Rome rather than in Prague.”78 Here we see the connection between Rome and Prague; both of these were associated with Freud’s Czech Amme, whose memory he had recovered earlier that year.79 Freud was aware that his repeated mention of Rome, and his dreams about it, indicated an underlying conflict. In the same letter, he noted: “Incidentally, my longing for Rome is deeply neurotic. It is connected with my schoolboy hero-worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and in fact this year I have no more reached Rome than he did from Lake Trasimene.”80 But almost everything deeply neurotic about Freud went back (as he himself asserted) to his first three years in Freiberg. And we have already seen how Freud’s identification with Hannibal was at least in part a screen for his partisanship with Scipio and Rome. At this time in his life, as Freud commented about Hannibal’s failure to reach Rome, he had not yet been able to overcome his block to visiting |