Freud's Repressed Feelings about Athena on the Acropolis

Correctly, it seems, Freud's editor has appended the date “January 1936” 35 to a letter 26 addressed by Freud to Romain Rolland on the occasion of the latter's seventieth birthday, which was Wednesday 29 January 1936.28 Freud himself was then some four months short of being eighty years old. He had been urgently pressed29 to write something in honor of Rolland on the occasion of the latter's seventieth birthday; and this letter was the result.29 The letter appears in “The Complete Standard Edition” under, curiously enough, three titles. They are “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” 27“Brief an Romain Rolland,” and “An Experience on the Acropolis.” 28 The first of these three titles is the major one.

We may suppose that the letter was completed shortly before Rolland's birthday (it is dated “January, 1936” and the birthday was at the end of that same month); and we may also suppose that it was written not only under urgent pressure, as Freud himself says,29 but in some haste, too. As provocation for the assumption that it was written in haste, we have Freud's own assertion that after being asked to write, he had spent a long time trying to find something worthy of Rolland,29 so that the time left for composition would have been shortened; and as support for the assumption we have another letter 11 which Freud wrote about the matter. This other letter bears the late date of January 6, 1936 and is addressed to a man who is among others, the one pressing Freud to write. Freud had evidently as yet, even at this late date of January 6, not written anything and was still protesting against writing. Regretfully, he refers 12 to what he was then calling “The Man Moses, a Historical Novel,” 9, 36 saying that this, already written (and written, in fact, a year ago),12 would have been” of special interest “to Rolland but suffered from one (or at least one) defect10, 45 which still precluded its publication.12 And in protest against writing anything more, he says in this l