find a positive attraction to an environment with a mild but marked religious atmosphere.
Mysticism, Music, and the AcropolisIn 1926 Freud struck up a correspondence with the French novelist Romain Rolland, a writer with whom Freud identified. Rolland was one of Freud’s many secondary alter-egos.98 In his first letter to Rolland (whom he had admired for some time), Freud used extremely curious and in many ways obviously Christian language. (Rolland, like Franz Brentano, was an ex-Roman Catholic, one of his better-known books being The Revolt of the Angels.) Unforgettable man, to have soared to such heights of humanity through so much hardship and suffering! I have revered you as an artist and apostle of love for mankind many years before I saw you.99 Three years later, in another letter, the topic of mysticism having apparently arisen, Freud responded by saying: How remote from me are the worlds in which you move! To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music. I cannot imagine reading all the literature which, according to your letter, you have studied. And yet it is easier for you than for us to read the human soul!100 We do not have the letter from Rolland, but nevertheless, from Freud’s response, a few assumptions seem safe. It should be noted that in this letter Freud coupled mysticism to music, thus reinforcing the earlier proposal that Freud’s rejection of music was rooted in his first experience of music in church with his “Anna.” Music always threatened to bring back his Moravian childhood of religious love and trust, followed by the anxiety and depression of being abandoned. And, of course, there would have been erotic associations to music triggered by his nanny as well. Such powerful emotions could best be controlled by avoiding music as much as possible. Freud said that he found mysticism (like all religious experience) foreign, but at least in this instance he was far from expressing hostility to it. Indeed, he implied that those who do know it can more easily “read the soul” than could he and his fellow psychoanalysts. In a later letter to Rolland (January 1930), Freud reverted to his standard (public) attitude by arguing that mystical experience is “highly valuable for an embryology of the soul when correctly interpreted, but worthless for orientation in the alien, external world.”101 Yet even after this return to form, he backed off in the next and final paragraph, with these rather unexpected words: “Just one more thing: I am not an out-and-out skeptic. Of one thing I am absolutely positive: there are certain things we cannot know now.”102 |