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cost, or to anticipated meetings at Easter, or to his favorite books. Or else (as here), they occurred in informal talks. It Is, as one would expect, In such settings that the unconscious does its work.
Even in some of Freud’s public anti-religious writings, he occasionally sounded a positive note about God. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he made this quite remarkable statement: One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers, in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing Him by an impersonal, shadowy, and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.”82 (This comment by Freud reminds me of an indignant remark made by a lapsed Catholic friend of mine, concerning the modern, “liberal” image of God: “That’s not the God I don’t believe in.” To be indignant is to reveal one’s lack of indifference.) The Virgin MaryFreud’s nanny, being rather old, would not have made a good psychological symbol for the Virgin Mary. It is not therefore surprising that Freud had relatively little to say about Mary, and when he did comment on her—for instance, in connection with Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne—it was often in a context in which an older second mother was present or was somehow associated with the Virgin. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at Freud’s explicit comments on the subject. His most “official” discussion of Mary occurred in a three-page paper written in 1911, titled “Great Is Diana of the Ephesians.” This article (it had the same title as a poem by Goethe) summarized historical information so as to make a psychological point.83 Apparently Freud had just read an art-historical treatise on the subject of Diana’s worship in the ancient world.84 Freud’s first point was that there had been a cult of a goddess, in particular Diana, at Ephesus in Turkey for many hundreds of years. This cult, besides its religious significance, had been a major source of economic livelihood for the people of Ephesus. Freud noted that, very early in the Christian era, St. Paul created a great tumult at Ephesus because he would have nothing to do with the Diana cult. Somewhat later, however, St. John (author of the fourth gospel) brought the mother of Jesus, who had been entrusted to him, to Ephesus; she took up residence there. About 300 years later, a basilica was built in honor of Mary at Ephesus. Freud interpreted all of this as a revival of the cult of Diana, now baptized as Mary. Some centuries later, the area was conquered by Islam, and all fell into ruin and obscurity. At the end of the article, Freud commented that in “our own days” the Virgin Mary had |