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knowledge of one of these paintings (Raphael’s Madonna)and a special interest in the age of the Madonna—an issue that made him think of a nursemaid. The chapel-like atmosphere of reverence would also have supported reveries and associations from the past. The visit occurred during the Christmas season, a time associated with the nanny. The entire discussion prefigured Freud’s analysis, 25 years later, of Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1910a). Furthermore, in Freud’s autobiographical response to all these paintings, there was an implicit identification of himself with Jesus as an infant (and, in the last painting, with Christ at the time of his betrayal). Then, too, strong sound similarities would have linked his two mothers with these paintings: “Amalia” and “Mama” all easily connect to “Amme,” to “Dame,” and then to “Anna” and “Nana”—all summed up in “Madonna.”56
Above all, Freud’s remarks were not about the style or form of these works. His reactions were not those of the art historian or aesthete. Freud was a man who always responded to a work in terms of its psychological content; he reliably ignored purely historical and stylistic issues (sometimes at his peril, as, for example, Meyer Schapiro has shown).57 It is also worth noting that aside from the Mona Lisa, the only paintings that Freud wrote about were explicitly Christian paintings, almost always centered on one or more members of the Holy Family: Mary, Anne, or Jesus. Freud may have personally collected and admired pre-Christian antiquities, but the art that moved him deeply enough for him to write about it was essentially religious and typically Christian. Even Michelangelo’s Moses, to be discussed later, belongs in a Christian context: The work is, of course, by one of the greatest Christian artists; it is part of a tomb in Rome honoring a great Pope; and Freud observed it from inside a small Christian church.58 The Fliess “Roman” Letters: 1887-1902After his marriage, Freud settled into family life and began concentrating fully on his career as a practicing physician, specializing more and more in the psychopathologies. By this time Freud had turned away from a research career at the University of Vienna, where he worked in the laboratory of great scientists, such as Ernst Brücke. One important reason for leaving the university research setting was that Freud’s relative poverty and to some degree his Jewishness were real barriers to advancement. I would argue that Freud was also beginning to suspect that his basic intellectual motivation and interest lay not in physiology and anatomy, but in the direction of psychology; he could study the latter just as well through his own practice, and in association with a hospital. This does not mean that Freud abandoned his youthful ambitions of a |