|
lost so long ago. Jones reports that “Freud’s choice of a souvenir of Paris was a photograph of Notre Dame.”41 Again, all of this constituted a surprising communication to a Jewish fiancée who irritated Freud by her observance of the dietary laws in her house and by her refusal to write letters on the Sabbath. Both rules, after pressure, Freud got Martha to abandon.42
Charcot, whom Freud admired greatly, was somehow associated for him with Notre Dame. In a letter written a few days after the letter about Notre Dame, Freud wrote to Martha that he was being deeply affected by his stay in Paris, especially by Charcot, about whom he said: Charcot, who is one of the greatest physicians and a man whose common sense borders on genius, is simply wrecking all my aims and opinions. I sometimes come out of his lectures as from Notre Dame, with an entirely new idea about perfection.43 The link between Charcot and Notre Dame—and Catholicism—was further developed in another letter, in which Freud described Charcot as “like a worldly priest.”44 Charcot did have a profound impact on Freud, for as a result of his exposure to Charcot’s discussions and observation of hysteria and hypnosis, Freud’s attachment to physiological and anatomical types of science weakened, and his interest in psychopathological phenomena increased markedly. Throughout his life Freud kept his admiration for Charcot, and it was for him that he named his eldest son Jean-Martin.45 Other religiously “loaded” expressions were used in Freud’s Paris letters. For example, in correspondence anticipating the Paris trip, he wrote optimistically of going to Paris, where he would become a great scholar and “then come back to Vienna with a huge enormous halo”46—the halo, implying sanctity, being of course a strictly Christian iconographical symbol. In another letter he speaks of Paris and the Parisians as “uncanny” and of the whole visit as representing a pleasant, confused dream.47 (More is said about this confused dream-like quality of the Paris visit in Chapter Four, in the section on Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris.) Near the end of his stay, he exclaimed: “[W]hat an ass I am to be leaving Paris now that spring is coming, Notre Dame looking so beautiful in the sunlight.”48 In short, the Paris episode was positive, exciting, dreamlike, uncanny; at its center were Notre Dame (Amme) and the priestlike Charcot, with their suggestion of “an entirely new idea about perfection.” It is an interesting detail—and presumably a reflection of the mindset we have just been discussing—that just before the trip to Paris, Freud asked Martha to embroider what Jones calls two “votive panels,” which Freud wished to hang over his desk in his hospital room.49 One of the inscriptions came from Voltaire’s Candide, the other from St. Augustine |