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Aside from Freud’s clear lack of any religious allegiance to Judaism, there was in Freud’s whole definition of himself as a Jew a distancing: For example, he used past tenses (“I was,” “I became,” etc.). He never affirmed, “I am a Jew.”
This strange distancing was also present in a letter written four days later to Marie Bonaparte, when he noted that “the Jews…have celebrated me like a national hero, although my service to the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Jewishness.”146 Why the references, in both of these letters, to the fact that he never renounced his Judaism (it was “foolish to deny it”), unless Freud had been tempted to do precisely that? During this period, Freud often remained critical of Christianity, as when he commented to Pfister: “My judgment of human nature, above all of the Christian-Aryan variety, has little reason to change.”147 And yet there were pro-Christian comments as well, such as his remarks about the Church protecting him from the Nazis and his description of Christianity in Moses and Monotheism (discussed below). Pentecost also came up one last time. It was in the late spring of 1938; Freud and his family had just escaped from Austria after the National Socialist takeover. He wrote to Max Eitingon on June 6: [W]e didn’t all leave at the same time. Dorothy was the first, Minna on May 5, Martin on the 14th, Mathilde and Robert on the 24th, ourselves incidentally not until the Saturday before Pentecost, June 3.148 This last train trip would have redintegrated (in fact, would have been a “reincarnation” of) that traumatic childhood train ride almost 80 years earlier, when at or shortly after Pentecost he had left his home in Freiberg—the ride when he thought about the souls burning in Hell. Here, at the same time of year, he was for the second time leaving his home in a dramatic train trip; this time, however, his Anna (his daughter) went with him. Both the themes of demonic possession and of the Anti-Christ came up one final time in these last years. Jones mentions that the last book Freud was able to read in the summer of 1939 was Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (The Skin of Chagrin).149 This early story by Balzac features a young man, an orphaned marquis, who is poor and struggling for success. He desires to write a great work, a “theory of the will,” which he knows will be involved with hypnotism and the occult. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, he believes he won’t be able to succeed and thus considers suicide. While contemplating suicide, he meets a strange character, a sorcerer (shades of Faust!). The sorcerer gives the young man a skin (of a wild ass) that has the power to satisfy all wishes; however, each time the skin is used it shrinks, as does the length of the life of the person using the skin. The marquis very quickly becomes rich and successful, as |