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by mutual agreement, we — the two boys — fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up
the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her a piece of black bread….
(We) hurry to the cottage and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact given some;
the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long knife.78
From this description, first, it is fairly certain that a nanny was present (a “peasant-woman” or nursemaid); second, given that we consider this to be the report of an authentic memory, it is clear that it occurred in the late spring or in the summer. It is understood that the two other children are Freud’s “cousins” (actually, his half-nephew and half-niece) John and Pauline. John was about a year older than Sigmund, while Pauline was younger than Freud. Krüll places this very important memory in the spring of 1859, and hence Freud was somewhat older than he remembered, as were the other two children.79 Thus, if the discovery of the thieving took place in May 1859 or a little later, Freud would have had his nanny until the age of three or so, and Freud’s claim of her great importance thus makes more sense. Furthermore, the evidence described throughout much of the rest of this study of the emotional significance for Freud of Easter and Pentecost is also much more understandable if these holidays were associated by him with the loss of the nanny. (For example, the Screen Memories paper was itself written the week before Pentecost.) In short, if the nanny was suddenly dismissed in late May (or early June), the event would have provided a basis in experience for what I call Freud’s “Easter-Pentecost complex.” (For much more on this, see Chapter Three.) Finally, it is clear that Freud connected the loss of his nanny with train travel and his leaving Freiberg, and thus it is likely that she disappeared only shortly before the family left Freiberg. There are still other reasons to think that the dismissal occurred later than Christmas of 1858-1859. One is that there is no mention of another nanny during 1859, who, under the circumstances of the new baby, would most definitely have been needed. Another point to keep in mind is that early memories are often inexact with respect to dates. The order of old events is usually recalled correctly, but the “blank” intervals of time between events are frequently dropped out, thus collapsing important occurrences into a shorter time period. Indeed, this kind of error occurred in the immediately preceding letter to Fliess, dated October 3, 1897 (just 12 days before the letter under discussion). There Freud wrote as follows: “…later (between the ages of two and two-and-a half) libido towards matrem was aroused; the occasion must have been the journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we spent a night together and I must have had the opportunity of seeing her nudam…”80 This passage occurs right after the sentences quoted earlier about the |