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or why the family split up. In general it was, in fact, a good time for business, and the Jewish
friends of the Freuds, all of whom stayed, did quite well.114 Jones has implied that anti-Semitism
was a factor, but this suggestion has been rebutted thoroughly by several authors.115 An explanation
for the departure is presented in the next chapter.
It should always be kept in mind that, in addition to sorrow and mourning, part of the psychological response to separation is great anger at the mother-figure for leaving. Thus anger and mourning, along with his attachment and love, would have become part of Freud’s association to the nanny and all she stood for. Bowlby gives many examples of the anger set up by separation experiences and the subsequent anxiety.116 Perhaps the most dramatic and poignant are cases such as that of an adolescent boy who murdered his mother and afterward exclaimed, “I decided she would never leave me again.”117 The importance of this separation experience for Freud is summarized by Suzanne Bernfeld in her essay on Freud’s early life, when she writes about the move from Freiberg that “this simple geographic change was a catastrophe for Freud and he spent the next forty years of his life trying to undo it.”118 The material presented below shows that Freud never did undo it, and that his nanny and his early Freiberg days would haunt him not just for the next 40 years, but for the rest of his life.119 The Theme of the Two MothersFreud’s biographers have noticed many things about him, but with rare exceptions they have overlooked Freud’s lifelong preoccupation with great figures who had two mothers. (An exception is Gedo, who in one article does draw attention to the “two mothers” theme in Freud’s life120; another who notes this is Spector, who brings up the issue of two mothers with specific reference to Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci.121) Certainly, one famous figure with two mothers is Oedipus, whose story served as the basis for Freud’s most distinctive and best-known contribution to personality theory, the Oedipus complex. The interesting point, for us, is that Oedipus has two mothers: his biological mother, Jocasta, and his functional mother, Merope. Jocasta, informed of the prediction that her newborn son would one day kill his father, has the baby Oedipus taken by a servant to be exposed in the nearby mountains. Instead of leaving the baby to die of exposure, the servant takes pity on him and gives him to a peasant, who in turn, takes the child to his master, Polybos, the King of Corinth. He is brought up in Corinth at the court by the King and the Queen, Merope. The tragedy Oedipus Rex itself focuses emphatically on the ambiguous parentage of Oedipus. Indeed, |