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of his Faust pact Freud would “sell his soul to the Church” cannot, then, be accepted. (There is, however, a possibility that Freud was considering an insincere conversion. Freud might even have considered converting for the purpose of undermining the Church, but more is said on this question in the next section.)
Velikovsky begins his case by quoting (or quoting from and paraphrasing) a number of Freud’s dreams. After each dream, he quotes (or quotes from and paraphrases) Freud’s own interpretation of the dream, and then he gives his own interpretation. What I do here is to quote extensively from Velikovsky’s presentation of Freud’s dreams, Freud’s interpretations, and his own interpretations; I then add my own commentaries. Because the amount of Velikovsky’s material is considerable, and because much of it in my judgment is somewhat unconvincing, I cite only those portions of his argument that I consider to furnish the clearest case. (The curious reader is invited to read Velikovsky’s entire article.) I should say in advance that while I think it is virtually certain that Freud was both unconsciously and consciously tempted to convert, I do not believe that actual conversion was likely. There is a great deal of evidence of Freud’s pride in his ethnic Jewishness, as well as evidence of his powerful rational skepticism about religion. These factors would, I believe, have served as a virtually insurmountable barrier to such a calculated conversion. There is, however, ample reason to think that Freud was tempted to convert—really, to assimilate—for reasons of ambition and self-interest. Freud knew many who had been baptized at least in part for purposes of career advancement—for example, the much admired Heine, as well as his uncle-in-law Michael Bernays, the Goethe scholar. There was also the case of the well-known Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, who was baptized in Vienna during Freud’s personal crisis in February 1897, and who then experienced a dramatic and immediate advancement in the Vienna music world.121 (Mahler, like Freud, was Jewish and spent his early years in Moravia.122) But, in general, the reader is urged to view this dream interpretation material as supporting the thesis that Freud had a powerful unconscious attraction to Christianity, derived front his nanny and connected to the hope of her return and also to the hope of salvation; that this attraction would naturally be found in Freud’s dreams; and that it would express itself in part through a veiled concern with conversion. FREUD’S DREAM OF THE BOTANICAL MONOGRAPHI have written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lies before me: I am just turning over a folded colored plate. A dried specimen of the plant as though from a herbarium is bound up with every copy.123 |