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to Easter, including a request that Abraham come “be with us, Friday before Easter.”63
During this correspondence, Abraham wrote substantially more letters than Freud, but he referred to Easter only twice—once in response to Freud,64 the other in the expression “the Easter holidays”65; he never referred to Pentecost. Freud also used, here again, the Latin quotation “Ceterum censeo” in one letter.66 In short, these letters, though written when Freud was primarily concerned with the problems and politics of psychoanalysis—and long after his earlier years of anxiety about career, Martha, and marriage—still show the vestiges of the same unconscious motives. Heine’s LazarusThe other favorite book of Freud’s—in addition to Paradise Lost, discussed in Chapter Four—was Heine’s Lazarus, and it is worthwhile to describe this little-known work briefly here.67 (Let us keep in mind that the author was a converted Jew related through marriage to the Bernays family.68) The title of Lazarus was given by Heine to a series or cycle of 20 short poems written and published near the end of his life. This was in the 1850s, when Heine was ill—in fact, slowly dying of a long-term, fatal condition. These poems are very autobiographical and refer constantly to the experiences of Heine’s life. Thus, in contrast to Paradise Lost, with its universal and cosmic themes, Heine’s work is personal and particular in many respects. The mood or attitude of Lazarus is, however, similar to that of Paradise Lost, in that both have strongly melancholic, retrospective themes. Heine’s poems are also filled with bitterness and sarcasm, though. These poems turn out to be of interest to us because they contain, in abundance, emotions, themes and even events remarkably similar to those of Freud’s life. The poems therefore reflect, in a sense, Freud’s life as well as Heine’s, and it is no wonder that they were among Freud’s favorite pieces of literature. The Lazarus in question is primarily the “poor man…full of sores” referred to in the gospel of Luke,69 but some of the poems seem to evoke the other Lazarus as well, the one whom Christ raised from the dead.70 The fact that the names are the same tends to conflate the two men and their stories. One important theme of the poems—sometimes treated positively, sometimes bitterly and sarcastically—is resurrection. For example, in “Der Abgekühlte” (“The Cooling Off”), we find these lines: And if one is dead, one must lie in the grave; I am worried (frightened); yes, I am worried (anxious) that the resurrection will not come soon. |