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the powerful lines of the seer, addressed to Oedipus in Scene One, haunt the entire play: “Who are
your mother and father?: Can you tell me?” And these questions are posed by Oedipus himself a few
lines later: “My parents again! Wait: who are my parents?”122
Another great personality who never ceased to attract and intrigue Freud was Moses. It is agreed by Freud’s biographers that in many respects Freud identified with this great Old Testament figure.123 Freud was particularly fascinated by Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, which Freud acknowledged as the work of art that most powerfully affected him; he studied it extensively, and finally discussed it in his now famous essay, The Moses of Michelangelo (1914a). Freud had a life-long interest in Moses, and, of course, his last great work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), was a book-length treatment of this great figure. According to the Old Testament account, young Moses was the son of a Hebrew couple who was taken care of by his natural mother for three months until it was no longer safe to do so: The Pharaoh had decreed that all male Hebrew babies were to be killed. The baby was then put in a basket and set in the river where it was found, at its edge, by the Pharoah’s daughter, who kept and raised him. Through a ruse, Moses’s natural mother nursed him for some time afterwards. But the eventual outcome was that his natural mother “brought him to Pharoah’s daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses.”124 In short, Moses had two mothers: a biological mother, who was a Hebrew, and a functional mother, who was Egyptian. Thus, the two most Important “theoretical” characters for Freud, throughout his life, were both deeply involved in situations of ambiguous parentage. Both had two mothers, one primarily biological and one functional, just as he had. The “two mothers” theme becomes all the more interesting when we consider Freud’s treatment of still another great historical character in his essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910a). In this work, Freud presented the world’s first psychoanalytic interpretation of a painting. The painting in question is Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see Figure 1-4). As its title indicates, this well-known work contains the three figures St. Anne (Anna), the Virgin Mary (Maria), and the baby Jesus, who is holding a lamb. The problem that this painting raised for Freud is that the two women are both painted as young. Why should St. Anne be represented as young when, as Jesus’s grandmother, she clearly had to be older then her daughter, Mary? (Also, Christian tradition holds that Anne was quite old when she conceived Mary.) Freud answered this question as follows: The picture contains the synthesis of the history of his childhood. The details of which are explainable by the most intimate impressions in Leonardo’s life…. |