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resulted perhaps in a chapel being built on the sacred spot, the visionary states of these maidens were inaccessible to influence. Today even the priesthood has changed its attitude to such things; it allows police and medical men to visit the seer, and since then the Virgin appears very seldom.93 Here Freud was in typical antireligious form.94 But his unconscious mind had entirely different attitudes toward the Virgin. One hint of this came out later in his life, when he wrote, “I do not think our cures can compete with those at Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracle of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.”95 In such a remark, Freud was presumably assuming belief in the unconscious as a kind of faith, or perhaps was asserting that both the unconscious and the miracle of the Blessed Virgin are true. At the very least, he was assuming the efficacy of miraculous cures. A quite casual setting provided the context of one of the most startling revelations of Freud’s strange involvement with Christianity. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote a journal in which she recorded (among other things) her visit to the Freud home in November-December 1921. She told at one point about various conversations with Anna Freud, who very much enjoyed her company: Listening to Anna talking about her father; picking mushrooms when they were children. When they went collecting mushrooms he always told them to go into the wood quietly and he still does this; there must be no chattering and they must roll up the bags they have brought under their arms, so that the mushrooms shall not notice; when their father found one he would cover it quickly with his hat, as though it were a butterfly. The little children—and now his grandchildren—used to believe what he said, while the bigger ones smiled at his credulity; even Anna did this, when he told her to put fresh flowers every day at the shrine of the Virgin which was near the wood, so that it might help them in their search [emphasis added].96 That such a very Catholic activity—in this case, more a superstitious than a devotional act—should have occurred at all, much less that it should have been a regular custom, is extraordinary. This was, after all, a family in which even the lighting of candles to mark the Jewish Sabbath was forbidden by Freud, to his wife’s displeasure, because Freud said he was opposed to all religious superstition! While on the subject of family outings, we should mention a report of Martin Freud’s about the family summers at Königsee. Here occasionally Freud would put his writing aside and take the family on an excursion. The place he liked best “was the small peninsula of St. Bartholomae…a truly lovely spot…given humanity by a very old inn and an equally old, if not older, chapel or church.” Here, his son continues, “The place had the happiest effect on him, allowing him to abandon his usual reserve and even to become a little playful.”97 They all liked especially to pick strawberries in the grove behind the church. Again, we |