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The topic of mystical experience also came up in a letter written to Romain Rolland in 1936. The letter (really a short article) was composed in honor of Rolland’s 70th birthday and was titled A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.103 The letter provided a description
and explanation of a peculiar experience that Freud had in 1904, when for the first (and only) time he visited the Acropolis in Athens. (The memory of the visit had kept recurring, and he became determined to analyze it.) For a variety of reasons, the trip to Athens had been decided upon suddenly, and thus with little advanced psychological preparation Freud found himself on the Acropolis. As he cast his eyes around at the landscape, he became aware of his strange psychological state. (Note the evidence in this quote that this state involved a splitting of his consciousness.)
[A] remarkable thought suddenly entered my mind: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!” To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually observable, from another person [emphasis added] who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful…. “So it really does exist…” The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had expected was rather some expression of delight or admiration.104 Freud emphasized that part of him thought it was all “too good to be true,” that the visit was like “when a girl learns that the man whom she secretly loved has asked her parents for permission to marry her.”105 In short, Freud described it as though something he had thought was an illusion had come true. Freud also described the experience as one of not quite believing that what he saw was real—an experience of “derealization.” He went on to characterize derealization as a process of splitting that defends the ego by denying reality. Then Freud provided an interesting historical example of this process. When the Moorish King Boabdil received news that his city Alhama (Alhambra) had fallen, he would not “let it be true.”106 This defense was demonstrated by his killing the messenger and burning the letters. The example is most interesting, because the historical event in question occurred when Boabdil received word that his city had fallen to Spanish Catholics—an event he knew also meant the complete triumph of Catholicism in Spain. Thus, this was another expression of Freud’s Hannibal-Scipio complex. From this example, we can interpret Freud’s rejection of Catholicism as requiring the psychological defense of dereali- |