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45 kilometers from Freiberg, was (and is) a place where people took
“cure,” the “waters,” for various ailments. Jones notes that Amalia, because
of a tubercular condition, occasionally visited Roznau.22
It is also significant that the Emanuel and Maria Freud family lived about three or four blocks away23; as we will see, Sigmund often played with Emanuel and Maria’s children, who were roughly his age. Emanuel Freud was Sigmund’s much older half-brother; he was in his mid-20s and was the eldest son of Freud’s father by an earlier marriage.24 (Jakob Freud’s first wife had apparently died.25) Philipp, another half-brother who was a year or two younger than Emanuel and was unmarried, lived even closer, in a house right across the street.26 Exactly when the Czech woman, Resi, began to function as young Sigmund’s nanny is not certain, but her involvement clearly began quite early in his life. Freud wrote that he was in his nurse’s charge from some time “during my earliest infancy.”27 Besides the presence of Resi in June 1857, when Sigmund was just over a year old, inferences based on other historical facts support Freud’s statement. In particular, Sigmund had a younger brother, Julius, who was born when Freud was about a year and five months old.28 This child became sickly and died on April 15, 1858, when Freud was not quite two.21 It is likely that Freud’s mother would, of necessity, have been preoccupied with this second child, and that the nanny would have assumed a major maternal role for Sigmund by this time — probably earlier. Freud’s biographers agree that it is of significance that as an adult Freud recalled the psychological importance for him of the birth of this baby brother, Julius, and of his death30: “I welcomed my one-year younger brother (who died within a few months) with ill wishes and real infantile jealousy … his death left the germ of guilt in me.”31 Certainly this report suggests a situation in which Sigmund felt he was losing some of his mother’s and possibly even some of his nanny’s previously available attention. To make matters worse, the death of Julius was followed only seven and a half months later by the birth of a sister, Anna, on December 31, 1858.32 And, of course, Amalia would have attended to the new child and nursed it, at least for some weeks afterwards. If we put all of this together, it becomes clear that Freud must have found his mother, Amalia, relatively unavailable to him from the time he was a little under a year old until he was close to three years old. After all, his mother was busy with two pregnancies and two births, and had a sick child who died during this time, while Sigmund was put in the charge of his nanny. There is no evidence that there was anyone else available to help the mother out. Freud’s father, Jakob, worked elsewhere in the town and often traveled in the surrounding area buying wool.33 There is, then, every reason to believe that the nanny filled the maternal vacuum during |