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as described in Chapter One brought on by the present separation from his fiancée. Freud’s reaction to Martha’s absence is so peculiar that its link to his early separation trauma seems certain. He writes:
a frightful yearning—frightful yearning is hardly the right word, better would be uncanny, monstrous, ghastly, gigantic; in short, an indescribable longing for you.26 The theme of Pentecost appeared many times throughout Freud’s life. All through his various correspondences, he referred to this feast often, generally to suggest a time of year for a meeting or reunion. (In his letters, it was always Freud who initiated the use of the word “Pentecost”; very occasionally, his correspondent would then use it once or twice as well.) In a letter to Martha a year later at Pentecost (May 26, 1885), Freud again brought up the subject: My precious darling, It would seem that as a result of the sympathy existing between us, your Pentecost has been no better than mine; that would be bad. Did you never wonder when you left Vienna how we should ever meet? Don’t you remember how pleased I was when you promised to remain here?27 Again, there was no a priori reason for Freud to raise the topic of Pentecost, except that it was indeed that time of year; again, he brought it up in the context of an underlying melancholy over separation. Also worthy of note is his special pleasure when Martha had promised “to remain.” But (like his nanny) she was unable to keep the promise, having had to leave Vienna for family reasons and go to live in Wandsbek.28 One of the important pieces of psychological evidence that Freud’s nanny was dismissed at the time of Pentecost is the curious fact that years later in 1899 Freud used “the week before Pentecost to write the essay on ‘Screen Memories’…”29 In view of the biographical nature of this essay, such an anniversary reaction would reinforce the link among the nanny, separation anxiety, and the time of Pentecost. There are other, curiously Christian accents in the Freud-Martha correspondence. In one of his first letters to Martha, written June 27, 1882, Freud listed some great places in the world that Martha would enjoy visiting: “the Alps, the waterways of Venice and the splendors of St. Peter’s in Rome.”30 Since Freud had not yet seen any of these places himself, the list suggested more his own desires than anything else. As to his listing St. Peter’s—the very center of Catholic Christendom—as one of the three places that his Jewish fiancée would most enjoy, it seems perhaps somewhat tactless; it was certainly odd. During this same period, Freud made clear his rejection of the Jewish marriage ceremony. In October 1883, Freud’s sister Anna married Eli Bernays, Martha’s older brother. Freud did not attend the wedding of his |