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tionship between Amalia and Philipp, and of the father-son conflict that it involved.
All of this means that Freud’s Oedipus complex would have been derived from a very important core of his own childhood experience. It would have been his older half-brother Philipp—not some remote aborigine—who “first” had the idea of sexually possessing the mother, and by implication of killing the father. And it is Philipp’s behavior that would have raised the Oedipal issue, not Freud’s unprimed unconscious of its own volition. Freud’s introduction to the primal group of sons hostile to the father (as in Totem and Taboo) would have been in his own family, when he was about three years old. For much of his life, Freud would have to struggle to come to terms with this experience and its deeply disturbing implications. The Meaning of the Name “Sigismund”It is relevant here to mention the story behind Freud’s name, “Sigismund,” and Its German equivalent, “Sigmund,” which he consistently used after his early youth. (His Hebrew name was “Schlomo.”) It has been suggested that he was named after Sigismund I, a famous king of Poland, who defended the religious rights of the Jews in Lithuania, a country then under Polish domination.51 This is possible, but another, more likely meaning of the name “Sigismund” is Czech and Catholic. At the time (as in most Catholic cultures), the first or Christian names given to children were typically saints’ names. St. Sigismund was a patron saint of Bohemia, which borders on Moravia; his relics are in Prague, and his saint’s day, May 1, is noted in Czech Catholic missals.52 Thus “Sigismund” had both Catholic and Czech significance; Freud’s parents could easily have picked it because they wanted a name with positive connotations for the surrounding culture, and because his feast day, coming ‘just before Freud’s birth on May 6, had suggested it to them. The deeper and psychological meaning of the name, however, comes from the strange story of St. Sigismund himself in a story well known in Czechoslovakia.53 The original Sigismund was a Burgundian King of the Franks in the sixth century. His first wife, by whom he had a son, Sigeric, died, and the king remarried. The new queen had a falling-out with Sigeric, her stepson, and she moved against Sigeric by telling King Sigismund that his son plotted to kill him to usurp the kingdom. The king, incited by the queen, had his son killed: The youth was throttled while he slept. When the deed was done, King Sigismund showed great remorse. He spent many days weeping and fasting. Apparently because of his deep repentance and the holy life he led after having his son killed, he was considered, by popular judgment, to be a |