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“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is a strange occasional piece, a letter Sigmund Freud offered to Romain Rolland in 1936, on that writer's seventieth birthday. In the letter, Freud describes an uncanny experience he had some thirty years ago, which has lately been haunting him. He tells of his first visit to Athens, accompanied by his brother Alexander, and of their paradoxical resistance to making the trip despite their longing to see the city. The “disturbance of memory” of the title refers to a sudden thought Freud had as he stood on the Acropolis for the first time: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!” (Freud 1936a, 241). Freud attributes this distortion, this illusion that he had actually doubted the existence of the Acropolis (which, he assures us, was not so), as well as the hesitation he and his brother had to visit Athens, to an internal inhibition: for both Freud and his brother, strong guilt feelings were attached to the trip. Travel, Freud explains, generally amounts to a rejection of the father, and thus a transgression against him: “I had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel … is rooted … in dissatisfaction with home and family” (247). By achieving the financial success and acquiring the intellectual sophistication to appreciate the sights of Athens, “to go such a long way” (246), the brothers were surpassing their father: “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the sons' superiority.1 Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him” (247).
In his introduction to the “Disturbance of Memory” Freud summarizes the course of his life's work: