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An experience of Freud's on the Acropolis (1936) has attracted increasing attention in recent years both as a contribution to ego psychology and as an autobiographical document that bears on the relevance of his personality and self-analysis to the attainment of scientific insights. Since many valuable studies are now available, we shall direct our attention especially to one aspect of the experience, the part played by his brother Alexander, his only companion during the experience. This “figure in the background” is generally overlooked but has a very important bearing, we suggest, on our understanding of two crises that Freud encountered, and indeed on his travel phobia and life history generally.
The first crisis occurred in 1904, when the experience on the Acropolis took place; the second in 1936 when it was described in a letter to Romain Rolland. The “Letter,” as we recall, constituted a gift to the French writer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday—a seemingly strange gift, as it treats so exclusively of an episode in Freud's own past that had come to trouble him increasingly in recent years. Moreover the spirit of the Letter is scarcely in keeping with a birthday celebration, since Freud laments the decline of his own powers as he approaches eighty and implicitly hold out the same prospects for his correspondent, though the latter is still hailed for his “youth” and vigor.
To be sure, there is also homage to Rolland as a great writer and humanitarian—characteristics which both men shared and had discussed in previous correspondence between them (E. Freud, 1960; Letters 217, 241, 242, 261). Indeed, the point of departure for the Letter lies in a comparison of the