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makes sense in terms of the existence of evil, and evil for the orthodox Christian is not an abstraction: There is an Evil One, a spiritual and personal expression of evil—in short, the Devil—to tempt others to do evil.
Again, although there is no direct evidence, one must wonder whether the nanny was anti-Semitic and made hostile remarks about Judaism. She may have laid some of the foundation for Freud’s rejection of Jewish religiousness. In any case, as the Devil is a compelling topic in himself, and as Freud first learned about him at the impressionable age of two or three from his functional mother, it should not be surprising that this topic had a permanent impact on him. As noted in Chapter One, Freud said that he had guilt feelings about the death of his younger brother Julius. Now, any death viewed in a Christian perspective raises the question of what happens to the soul of the dead person. It is clear that Julius’s death, at a time when Freud was close to his nanny, must have been connected for him with Heaven and Hell (and the Devil). Freud’s extraordinary association of the gas lights at Breslau with souls burning in Hell is both a primitive Christian image and one virtually certain to be connected with the notion of Satan, who is central to that iconography. Not only did Freud get his initial grounding in the concept of Hell within the Christian tradition, but his subsequent involvement in this and related ideas was continuously maintained by his thorough and ongoing immersion in texts permeated by the Christian concept of the Devil. These texts were the most important literary influences in Freud’s adult life; they were texts that he read and admired, to which he referred often, and that he frequently quoted in his letters and in his scientific works. As such, they represent an immediate, undeniable source, as well as an expression, of Freud’s attraction to the idea of the Devil. There is no need to seek out remote or esoteric sources for this interest. Freud and LiteratureAs Sulloway has shown, biological science certainly had an impact on Freud’s theorizing; he was a physician and a research scientist.5 But there was an even greater source of ideas for Freud, and this was literature. The foundation text of Freud’s literary approach, amply documented by Pfrimmer, was the Philippson Bible so important in his childhood.6 When he was an adult, the influence of novels, poetry, biography, and similar types of material became profound and pervasive throughout his work. It is not just that Freud was preoccupied with Biblical figures, nor yet that such concepts as the Oedipus complex have literary sources; what is most striking is the enormous frequency with which Freud cited literary texts in order to exemplify his crucial psychological insights. |