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start a new life in Rome “learning the eternal secrets.” Of course, he referred as well to his identification with Hannibal, and there can be no doubt about his conscious hostility to Rome; however, we should also recall that his just-proposed principle of wish-fulfillment includes the “coupling of opposites.”
We have looked at some of the major references to Easter and Pentecost, but what is also striking is the sheer number of references to these Christian holidays, coupled with the absence of any mention of any Jewish holidays. In the 1954 edition of the letters to Fliess, there are 23 references to Easter; the complete edition of 1985 provides 12 additional references to Easter in the period 1897-1902. References to Pentecost (Whitsunday), with its association to spiritual rebirth, occur in six letters of the 1954 edition and eight more letters of the 1985 edition.90 In a clearly Christian reference, Freud described his young son Ernst in one letter as being as “full of wounds as Lazarus”91; the reference is unmistakably to the beggar mentioned in Luke 16:20 ff. (See the discussion of Heine’s Lazarus poems in Chapter Six.) Freud referred to God occasionally in the correspondence, and not in any obviously negative way—though sometimes with a certain sarcasm, as here: “Now in this case the Almighty was kind enough to remove the father by death before the child was eleven months old.”92 In any case, in this series of 150 letters, I could not find a single reference to any strictly Jewish religious idea. After Freud had completed and published The Interpretation of Dreams, he finally overcame his inhibitions and visited Rome. However, Freud never did visit Rome at Easter, which was his greatest desire. Some inhibition permanently held him back from that. Instead, his visits were almost always in September—the worst time of year with respect to weather, and the least likely to have any Christian liturgical significance.93 Be all that as it may, his first visit was a most important event, about which he wrote to Fliess as follows: I ought to write to you about Rome, but it is difficult. It was an overwhelming experience for me, and, as you know, the fulfillment of a long-cherished wish. It was slightly disappointing, as all such fulfillments are when one has waited for them too long, but it was a high-spot in my life all the same. But, while I contemplated ancient Rome undisturbed (I could have worshipped the humble and mutilated remnant of the Temple of Minerva near the forum of Nerva), I found I could not freely enjoy the second Rome; I was disturbed by its meaning, and, being incapable of putting out of my mind my own misery and all the other misery which I know to exist, I found almost intolerable the lie of the salvation of mankind which rears its head so proudly to heaven.94 Statements such as this one have been used (e.g., by Jones) to portray Freud’s attachment to Rome as based only on his attraction to ancient |