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One is reminded here of Bowlby’s discussion of the reactions of people to the death of a loved one. For example, Bowlby describes one major phase of mourning as involving “yearning and searching for the lost figure lasting… sometimes for years.”116 Bowlby speaks of visits made by grieving persons to old haunts associated with their dead loved ones as they continue to search for them. It is into this pattern that Freud’s visits to Rome, Notre Dame, and various other churches can be integrated, and in this context they make sense.
Freud was explicit about the source of happiness: “Happiness is the subsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money was not a wish in childhood.”117 What was Freud’s childhood wish, if not reunion with his nanny? Possibly Freud had also through her learned to want to be in Rome, especially at Easter. Perhaps there was just a general association in his mind between his nanny and churches in general. Perhaps the refreshment of Rome was even more childlike and simple: If the bells flew to Rome to be rejuvenated, then so might he. Of course, Freud’s wish to be in Rome at Easter may in fact have been a wish for some kind of salvation, and it is to that possibility that we turn next. The Desire for Baptism: Velikovsky’s Thesis and Freud’s DreamsIn 1941, Emmanuel Velikovsky published an article analyzing the dreams of Freud as found in The Interpretation of Dreams. Velikovsky has proposed that these dreams showed that at the time of his self-analysis, Freud was struggling with the possibility of converting to Christianity—specifically, to Roman Catholicism. Enough material suggesting or at least consistent with such a possibility has already been presented in the present book to make Velikovsky’s suggestion seem far from preposterous, and its out-of-hand rejection by Jones118 is attended to later. But first Velikovsky’s argument needs to be summarized. According to Velikovsky, a major driving motivation for Freud at this period in his early 40s was professional advancement, and Freud was quite aware that his Jewishness was a serious obstacle to his desired goal of a professorship at the University of Vienna. Velikovsky claims that Freud’s “inner struggle for unhampered advancement” meant that “he would have to conclude a Faust-pact; he would have to sell his soul to the Church.”119 Though he is unsure on this point, Velikovsky conjectures that Freud was unconscious of this desire.120 A Faust pact with the Church—a pact involving baptism—is a contradiction in terms; the Faust legend is part of the Christian tradition, and thus can hardly see baptism as diabolical. Velikovsky’s notion that as part |