"Disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, A"

"DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE ACROPOLIS, A"

Sigmund Freud had begun corresponding with Romain Rolland in 1923, and this open letter is the acme (and indeed the end) of their exchange. In it, Freud relates a personal experience dating from his first visit to Athens, in 1904. He had climbed the Acropolis in company with his brother Alexander, who was ten years his younger—the same age, in fact, as Roll-and—and in front of the Parthenon he was overtaken by a feeling of strangeness, of a sense that "this is too good to be true."

In 1904 Freud was bringing his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess to a close in an atmosphere of conflict. A transference to Fliess had provided him with the support needed for his original self-analysis, and it was not until 1936, relying now on a transference to Rolland, that he was able to analyze this episode. The few pages of the letter here under consideration are a self-analytical summary of an entire lifetime, and they retrace the path followed by Freud's whole work, with two Frenchmen standing for the beginning and end points respectively: at the beginning, Charcot (suggested by Freud's use of several French psychiatric terms of the period); and, at the end, Romain Rolland.

The letter resembles an analytic session, with Freud addressing an alter ego to whom he seems to have lent his pen, thus handing off the role of analyst (Kanzer, Mark, 1969). Oedipal themes are in evidence: guilt about having surpassed the father and conquered the mother (Athens, after Paris and Rome) by producing a work of whose value Freud was well aware. The feeling of strangeness (or "derealization") might stem from the emergence of unconscious material (or "sensations") split off as a result of the trauma experienced by Freud at the age of two, when his young brother Julius died. Here Freud's letter mirrors Rolland's evocation—in his Voyage Within, which he began writing right after his visit to Freud in 1924—of the death of his sister Madeleine when he was five, and the long mourning of his mother that followed. Freud's letter is also a response (itself deferred) to his French friend concerning the inner reality of that oceanic feeling whose existence in himself Freud had at first denied (in Civilization and Its Discontents [1930a], p. 65); here he stresses the feeling's traumatic aspect—perceived only when there is no longer a split between the two levels of mental functioning involved.

Feelings of strangeness also arise from the gulf separating Freud's integration into German culture (the Acropolis being associated with the cult of antiquity of the Goethe years) and the sotto voce reference to the destroyed temple in Jerusalem, a foundation of Freud's Jewishness; the first title given this letter, namely "Unglaube [disbelief or incredulity] auf de Akropolis," is certainly evocative of Freud's identity as an atheist Jew, and suggests a kind of Spinozist collusion with his churchless Christian correspondent.

But if the hallowed nature of the site (see Freud, 1927c) harks back to religion—the chief topic of the Freud-Rolland correspondence—in a more secular sense it summons up the origins of sublimation as a latent theme of the dialogue between these two great creators. The Erlebnis, Freud's experience of the Acropolis, bespoke the rush of emotion that assailed him on this high place as his life's work was just getting under way; by 1936 Freud could look back in tranquility on the road behind him.

To his correspondent, likewise well on in years and nearing the end, Freud sends a message that is also a meditation on death—and on immortality. Embedded within it is the fantasy that he might climb up to the Acropolis accompanied by a winner of the Nobel Prize—a distinction which Freud, discreetly, had not abandoned hope of attaining himself. The resolution of Freud's transference to Romain Rolland would free up a vital energy sufficient to inspirit a cluster of last writings developing many of the themes touched upon in this open letter.

Henri Vermorel

See also: Déjà-vu; Depersonalization; Disavowal; Freud, Jakob Kolloman (or Kelemen or Kallamon); Freud, Sigmund (siblings); Illusion; Memory; Oceanic feeling; Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile; "Uncanny, The."

Source Citation

Freud, Sigmund. (1936a). Brief an Romain Rolland: Eine Erinnerungsstörung auf der Akropolis. In Almanach der Psychoanalyse 1937, Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, pp. 9-21; GW, 16, 250-57; A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis: An open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. SE,22:239-48.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21, 1-56.

——. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21, 57-145.

Kanzer, Mark. (1969). Sigmund and Alexander Freud on the Acropolis. American Imago, 26, 324-54.

Parat, Catherine. (1988). Dynamique du sacré. Lyon: Cesura.

Vermorel, Henri and Vermorel, Madeleine. (1993). Sigmund Freud et Romain Rolland. Correspondance 1923-1936. (Alain de Mijolla, Ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.