scruff of the neck, I swear, would ever these people smell the devil.”117 This disturbing statement, along with the two preceding quotes, certainly implies that, in some sense, Freud saw himself as actively working against the angels of the Lord.
ConclusionIf we look back on Freud’s life from the time of his late 20s up until his self-analysis, and for a few years afterward, it is apparent that the issues of Heaven and (especially) Hell, of the Devil and damnation, were deeply connected to his personal motivation. What were the works that most powerfully moved him? The Temptation of St. Anthony, Faust, Notre Dame de Paris, Paradise Lost, Don Giovanni, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Aeneid, the Inferno, and much of Huttens Letzte Tage all belong in this list. All these works are centrally preoccupied with the Devil or with evil; with Heaven and Hell; or with hostility to Rome as a symbol of Catholicism. When the Devil does appear in person in these works, it is invariably as a compelling and fascinating figure; God may be the ultimate and highest good (and the final victor), but the Devil and Hell are psychologically and literally dominant in this literature. Furthermore, it was to themes that Freud was drawn in a work, and not much to an author or his style. Thus, there is no evidence that Freud read any Flaubert except The Temptation (he never read, for example, the much more famous Madame Bovary). The only Victor Hugo Freud seems to have read is Notre Dame. There is no evidence that Freud read Paradise Regained or Dante’s Purgatorio or Paradiso. No doubt Freud knew of these great works and their general meaning, but he apparently never read them. These writings constituted the core of Freud’s involvement with literature, and much of this core is focused on the Devil, on the demonic. Although the material cited in earlier chapters shows Freud’s positive attraction to the Christian God, the evidence cited here makes a strong case that a very important part of Freud sided with Satan against God and Heaven and Christ, and sided with the enemies of the Church. But what is one to make of all this? Before again taking up the thesis of a pact with the Devil, and offering a new interpretation, we must take a detour into some major and almost unexplored aspects of Freud’s own psychology. |