Christians would all certainly have appealed to him. But, perhaps most importantly, many of Heine’s themes of mourning and sorrow must have spoken to Freud: loss, exile, the long-gone month of May, the dead child, the Woman of Sorrows, and the lost, heartbroken child.71
Other Examples of Christian ArtAside from religious paintings already discussed that drew explicit responses from Freud, there were others that he liked. Again, Spector’s The Aesthetics of Freud is helpful; Spector identifies two paintings with relevant content, reproductions of which hung for years on the wall near Freud’s desk in Vienna.72 One of these was The Healing of Aeneas and the Raising of Tabitha by Masaccio and Masolino. (It is reproduced in Figure 6-1, and a photograph of Freud with his copy is shown in Figure 6-2.) This work shows two scenes from the New Testament (Acts 9:32-43) in which St. Peter heals a man with palsy (on the left) and raises the recently deceased Tabitha from the dead (on the right). As Spector notes, Freud very likely interpreted these events as examples of psychological healings of persons suffering from hysteria.73 Spector specifically comments that Freud considered palsy and cataleptic sleep to be hysterical symptoms, and that the role of St. Peter can be compared to that of Charcot.74 (See the familiar engraving of Charcot with an hysterical patient in Figure 6-3; this engraving was a favorite of Freud’s.) In one of his late works, Charcot concluded that hysterics are among the best subjects for treatment by faith healing.75 In spite of the theory, however, I have never come across examples of sudden psychological cures for either palsy or cataleptic sleep, in Freud’s writings or elsewhere in the psychological literature. The latent meanings for these paintings are not touched on by Spector. Certainly one is tempted to believe that in some respects Freud saw himself as a kind, of faith healer, as a kind of competitor to the older Christian tradition. Freud’s remark that psychoanalysis is “secular pastoral counseling,”76 like many other comments cited earlier, supports the secular religious meaning of psychoanalysis rather thoroughly. These healing scenes also connect with the frescoes by Signorelli, which show the Anti-Christ deceiving people with false healing. To see oneself in competition with St. Peter is surely to invite such an interpretation. Another work of art mentioned by Spector77 but not discussed by him is The Kiss of Judas (1508) by Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 6-4). Kept in reproduction near Freud’s desk,78 this is a most unusual image for him to have among the art he presumably liked. What could it mean? The attraction of Freud to the scene of the betrayal of Christ first became |