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his wounds after being thrown out of Heaven; he is speaking with one of his fallen helpers and planning a new attack on God.
The story continues with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, but at the end of the poem they learn that redemption will come many years in the future: It will come through the seed of Eve, and with it Paradise will be restored. (It is Interesting to note that Eve learns of all this through a dream, just as she dreamed of her temptation in advance. That dreams are to be taken seriously was assumed by Milton, and by many other writers who influenced Freud as well.) The major explicit expression of this final redemptive outcome is, of course, found in Milton’s sequel to this work, Paradise Regained. Freud does not appear to have read this poem, though, given his knowledge of literary culture, he must have known of its existence and general theme. There is an interesting parallel between Milton’s three-tiered world of Heaven (God)-Earth (man)-Hell (Satan) and the Superego-ego-Id of Freudian theory. Moreover, the greatest power appears to lie with the id (Satan), who is the energetic leader of rebellion, seduction, and violence. Adam and Eve, as representations of the ego, are certainly the weakest in this trio, while God, Jesus, and the loyal angels (the superego) are portrayed in Milton, but not in Freud, as the ultimate victors. But despite the eventual future victory, It is Satan who at the end of Paradise Lost has won the first great battle by bringing about the loss of Paradise for mankind, and it is Satan, the spirit from the deep, who comes across within this work as the true power to be reckoned with.79 Mozart’s Don GiovanniFreud expressed an unusual, and indeed most peculiar, attitude toward music. Here was a man living in perhaps the major music capital of the world, during a period of great creative musical activity—a man who, moreover, was very open to culture—but who explicitly said that he did not like music. Freud’s words on the subject are revealing: “[W]ith music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”80 In general, this self-description seems to have been quite accurate, for Freud rarely if ever went to concerts, and showed little interest in music. As I have already proposed above, I believe that this rejection of music came from Freud’s early experience of church music. To hear organ, instrumental, and choral music, and also bells, would have activated painful, unconscious memories in Freud—memories of his lost nanny and her world. |