Freud s Gruesome Dream, Dissecting My Own Pelvis. Robert L. Lippman, Ph.D. In the most proper sense [Paul] was a man of an innately

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1 1 Freud s Gruesome Dream, Dissecting My Own Pelvis Robert L. Lippman, Ph.D. In the most proper sense [Paul] was a man of an innately religious disposition; the dark traces of the past lurked in his mind, ready to break through into its more conscious regions. (Freud,1939; )... My own superstition has its roots in suppressed ambition (immortality) and in my case takes the place of that anxiety about death which springs from the normal uncertainty of life.... [Freud's jottings in his interleaved copy of the 1904 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901, [1904], 260, ed.n) ] In response to his 81 year-old father, Jakob s death ( October 23, 1896 ), which left him feeling uprooted, Sigmund Freud began analyzing himself, primarily by studying his dreams. In 1897, several months into his detailed selfanalysis, he discovered that he is a Cain: I greeted my one-year-younger brother (who died after a few months) with adverse wishes and genuine childhood

2 2 jealousy his death left the germ of [self-]reproaches in me. (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess of October 3, 1897; Freud, 1985, 268) Oppressed by his fratricidal sense of guilt, Freud secretly resolved to make an atonement by delivering the children other Juliuses (and Sarahs)--from the scourge of anti-semitism. He would do so by instituting an enlightened secular world. But before setting others free from their religious shackles, he plans to set himself free from his own chains, both Jewish and, thanks to his faithful Czech nanny, Roman Catholic. He would liberate himself in Rome by, on the one hand, taking his stand before his personal totem, Michelangelo s Moses, and, on the other hand, by resisting the temptation to accept Christ as his Redeemer which, he anticipates, would be intense in the center of Christendom--especially before Michelangelo s Last Judgment. Freud s secret messianic ambition informs Dissecting My Own Pelvis which he dreamt in the summer of Relating it, Freud (1900) begins: Old [Der Alte] Brucke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and my legs. (452 [ original, 455].)

3 3 Ostensibly, Old Brucke is Freud s former mentor at the University of Vienna Medical School, the eminent physiologist Ernest Brucke ( ). According to Freud, who has yet to complete The Interpretation of Dreams, it is appropriate that Brucke is the one who set him the task : I reflected on the amount of self-discipline it was costing me to offer the public even my book upon dreams I should have to give away so much of my own private character in it. Das Beste was du wissen kannst, Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen [ The best that you know you must not tell to the boys. ] The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams. Old Brucke came in here appropriately; even in the first years of my scientific work it happened that I allowed a discovery of mine to lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on his part drove me into publishing it. (Freud, 1900, 453-4; bracketed quote from Goethe s Faust, as translated by James Strachey.) The above amounts to a veiled confession: my concern about giv[ing] away so much pertains principally to my fear that by revealing my dreams I d give

4 4 away, expose, reveal, my secret ambition. Through his on-going self-analysis, mainly by studying his current dreams, Freud is readying himself for his trials in the Eternal City. In as much as he is taken over by his secret messianic ambition, this vast ambition informs many, if not most, of his current dreams some of which, of necessity, he will include in his dream book. In other words, he is in a bind: To eventually institute his Promised Land, Freud first must become an acknowledged authority, a scientist of the first order; to ultimately gain such recognition, he is writing a book on dreams which, he hopes, would be acclaimed a masterpiece; since of necessity he is including his most intimate dreams, he is thereby putting at risk his Promised Land. For no matter how carefully he conceals his ambitious dreams, they, Freud understands, can be broken. Immediately after alluding to his visit to Orvieto two years earlier, Freud reiterates the dream s ending: I woke in a mental fright [gedankenschreck], even after the successful emergence of the idea that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to (455 [original, 457]) According to McGrath (1986), the children actually represented [Freud s] followers, and the underlying wish pointed to the founding of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud hoped to secure intellectual followers

5 5 to spread the understanding and practice of psychoanalysis (302) [T]he underlying wish, however, pointed to far beyond the founding of the psychoanalytic movement. It pointed to the instituting of Freud s Promised Land, a brotherly world populated by his spiritual, enlightened line. Old [Der Alte] Brucke must have set me some task Earlier in the dream book, Freud, after making an allusion to Ernest Brucke, notes that the honored name of Brucke in German means bridge (206). Fluent in Latin and with an avid interest in the ancient world (Gay, 1988, 171), Freud in all likelihood knows that Pontiff is derived from Pontifex, literally, bridge-maker. Accordingly, given what he secretly plans to do, it would have been easy for Freud to intuit that Old Brucke is a screen for that Pope or Pontiff of old, who, by commissioning the statue, had set Freud the task of taking his stand before Moses/Moses: Julius II ( ). In another section of the dream book, Freud gives the following account of a time when he arrived late to Professor Brucke s lab-- an account which strongly suggests that Freud s dreaded encounter with Moses/Moses is among his dream-thoughts: What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing No one who can remember the great man s eyes, which retained their striking beauty in his old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, will find it difficult to picture the young sinner s emotions. (op. cit.,422; my italics )

6 6 Now, bearing in mind the above, and also the fact that a large plaster copy of Moses was stationed in the museum of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, please consider the following from Freud s 1914 essay, The Moses of Michelangelo :.... How often have I mounted the steep steps from the un- lovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church [of St. Peter in Chains] stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero's glance [Blick des Heros]!... (Freud, 1914, 213 [ Der Moses des Michelangelo, 175]; my italics.) According to The New Cassell's German Dictionary (1962), blick ( glance ) means touches of light, and blicken, in addition to meaning to glance, means to shine ( cf. Exodus 34: 30:... the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come to him. ) Pertinent here Is Moses warning to the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai: Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and live. (Exodus 33:20) In addition to his Jewish sensibility, Freud s Roman Catholic sensibility contributed to his mental fright. Dissecting My Own Pelvis is the only published dream of Freud s to which he alludes to his 1897 visit to Orvieto, and, where in its Cathedral, among other works, he viewed Luca Signorelli s Last Judgment frescoes ( ) which informed Michelangelo s Last Judgment ( ). The following summer Freud failed to recall Signorelli s name; to

7 7 Wilhelm Fliess, he wrote, I could not find the name of the renowned painter of the Last Judgment in Orvieto, the greatest I have seen so far ( letter September 22, 1898; Freud, 1985, 326; my italics). Was Freud s principal motive in visiting Orvieto then to steel himself for Michelangelo s huge (about 2,152 square feet), incense-blackened Day of Judgment? It seems that this was the case. Accord-ing to Freud, Dissecting My Own Pelvis was instigated by a conversation in which he refers to Rider Haggard s novel, She: Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in my job in the dream, had been calling on me. Lend me something to read she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard s She: A strange book but full of hidden meaning..the end of the adventure of She is that the guide [on a perilous journey to an undiscovered region], herself and the others, perishes in instead of finding immortality for a mysterious subterranean fire. A fear of that kind was unmistakenly active in the dream-thoughts (453-4; italics mine.) In addition to his dreaded ordeal before Moses/ Moses, a profound fear of Doom s Day seems then to have been active in the dream-thoughts of this dream from which he woke in a mental fright. Conversion to Roman Catholicism, not only guarantees Freud Redemption. It holds out the promise of reuniting in Paradise with his baby brother, Julius. In The Miracle of the Mass of Bolsena, Raphael depicts his

8 8 patron that Old Brucke, Pope Julius II, observing with intense interest the young officiating priest captivated by the blood-stained chalice clothe, the Santo Corporale (1263). In the Church of S. Cristina in the little town of Bolsena ( 12 miles from Orvieto), this visiting Bohemian priest s doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation vanished in an instant. In the Sistine Chapel in the Eternal City, especially in the presence of Michelangelo s Last Judgment, would Freud s doubts about Christ s divinity vanish on the spot? Only too well does this tormented soul understand: this is both a fear and a wish. REFERENCES CASSELL S GERMAN DICTIONARY, The NEW. (1962). New York: Funk and Wagnalls. FREUD, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. Vienna, G. W. II/III. FREUD, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. S. E FREUD, S. (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. S. E. 6 FREUD, S. (1914). Der Moses des Michelangelo. G. W. X. FREUD, S. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. S. E. 13. FREUD, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. S.E. 23. FREUD, S. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

9 9 GAY, P. (1988). FREUD: A Life for Our Times. New York: Norton. LIPPMAN, R. (2008). Freud s failure to recall the name of Luca Signorelli, Internationalpsychoanalysis.net ( January 17). LIPPMAN, R. (2009). Freud s Botanical Monograph Screen Memory Revisited. Pychoanalytic Review, 96 (4), August. McGRATH, W. J.(1986). Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria. New York: Cornell Univ. Press. Robert L. Lippman, Ph.D Glenbrook Road Louisville, KY RobbyLippman@aol.com

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