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Chapter Three of the pretty girls gathered outside a cathedral for Easter Mass). Freud described a visit to the dramatic caves of St. Canigan, which he likened to the Inferno as depicted by Dante.109 Four letters later (July 7, 1898) Freud wrote again of Dante and of the secret theme of “unsatisfied revenge and inevitable punishment, represented by Dante as continuing through all eternity.”110 The theme of Easter and Rome surfaced once more in the early months of 1899, with his longing to visit Rome.111 In July of that year, he told Fliess that he would use the line from the Aeneid as his motto112 for the “Egyptian Dream Book,” which was about to go to press.113
The correspondence continued with many Easter references, and one letter (March 23, 1900) contained the statement: “No one can help in what oppresses me, it is my cross, which I must bear , and heaven knows my back is getting noticeably bent under it.…”114 All in all, this was quite a Christian definition of his situation, especially since the next sentence referred to his plan at Easter to visit Trent. The cross Freud referred to was a deep inner crisis involving depression and the collapse of intellectual or emotional illusions, the exact nature of which was unspecified. In a letter of May 1900, Freud wrote: [I]t will be a fitting punishment for me that none of the unexplored regions of the mind in which I have been the first to set foot will ever bear my name or submit to my laws. When breath threatened to fail me in the struggle I prayed the angel to desist, and that is what he has done since then. But I did not turn out to be the stronger, though since then I have been noticeably limping. Well, I really am forty-four now, a rather shabby old Jew…115 In this passage, Freud was comparing himself to Jacob, who wrestled with the angel of the Lord (Genesis 32), the result being a wounded thigh and a limp. There is further evidence of Freud’s concern with the Devil in a letter to Fliess, dated July 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams had now been out for some months, but I think that these words of Freud’s (which evoke Dante’s Inferno) very accurately describe the intellectual struggle that led to the “dream book ” and that continued for some time afterwards: The big, problems are still unsettled. It is an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating; and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest centre.116 Presumably this passage refers as well to Freud’s new book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), which he was working on at the time. When some time later he was told of the popular success of this book, Freud replied by quoting from Faust: “Not even if he had them by the |