T. S. Eliot, has made this point with regard to Eliot’s Irish nanny, who “frequently talked to him about
God.”90 Also, she often took the young future poet to Catholic services. This was in St. Louis, Missouri,
where Eliot was born and grew up in an otherwise liberal environment of Unitarianism. Sencourt
suggests that Eliot’s later rejection of his family’s religion and his conversion to the Church
of England, with its then very strong Anglo-Catholic character, was in part determined by the
effect of these early Catholic experiences on the impressionable young Eliot.91
Washed in the Blood of the LambThose stimulating letters from Freud to Fliess contain a number of extremely curious comments, but perhaps none so strange as those he made in a letter of October 3-4, 1897. Here Freud wrote: Last night’s dream produced the following under the most remarkable disguises: … I saw the skull of a small animal which I thought of as a “pig” in the dream, though it was associated in the dream with your wish of two years ago that I might find a skull on the Lido to enlighten me, as Goethe once did. But I did not find it. Thus it was “a little Schafskopf.” (literally a little “sheep’s head;” figuratively, “blockhead”) The whole dream was full of the most wounding references to my present uselessness as a therapist. Perhaps the origin of my tendency to believe in the incurability of hysteria should be sought here. Also she (the nanny) washed me in reddish water in which she had previously washed herself [emphasis added] (not very difficult to interpret; I find nothing of the kind in my chain of memories, and so I take it for a genuine rediscovery). A severe critic might say that all of this was phantasy projected into the past instead of being determined by the past. The experimenta crucis would decide the matter against him. The reddish water seems a point of this kind. Where do all patients derive the horrible perverse details which are often as alien to their experience as to their knowledge?92 What is one to make of these most unusual references? Apparently Freud’s biographers have remained largely silent because of the obscurity of the passage, despite Freud’s frustrating aside, “not very difficult to interpret.” Confused silence was certainly my initial response. However, after reading a draft of the present text, a colleague and scholar of Freudian theory, Professor Robert R. Holt, has proposed a religious interpretation with which I agree.93 First, Holt makes the important observation that nowhere in the letter did Freud claim that he had recovered direct memories of actual early events. Instead, he was giving constructions or hypotheses, which, if true, would explain his dreams. But he was not giving the exact texts of the dreams themselves. Notice that he wrote, “Last night’s dream produced the following under the most remarkable of disguises.” |