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In his monumental biography of Freud, Ernest Jones records that in his final examination at Sperl Gymnasium young Freud earned high honors for his mastery of Vergil and Sophocles' Oedipus the King (Jones, 1954, vol. 1, p. 22). The connections between Freud and Sophocles' most famous hero Oedipus are universally known. I should like to propose, however, that there is also something of a pattern, which apparently has been overlooked, that connects Freud with Vergil's most famous hero, Aeneas.
One especially distinctive feature of Freud's personality was his tendency to identify very intensely and emotionally with certain figures of Greco-Roman literature and history, especially Hannibal (Tourney, 1965, p. 68; Freud, 1900, vol. 4, pp. 196-198;1 Freud, 1901, pp. 217-220; McGrath, 1986, pp. 62-66) and Brutus (McGrath, 1986, pp. 285-287). Freud's strong tendency to identify with the heroes of classical antiquity extended to mythological figures as well, most notably Heracles (Freud, 1900, vol. 5, p. 469; Freud, 1923, p. 84). In this connection it is noteworthy that Vergil's Aeneid (7.312) is the very cornerstone of psychoanalysis, the opening words of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (“If I cannot bend the gods of heaven, I shall move the powers of hell”). Likewise, near the beginning of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud takes as his starting point a lapse of memory which a friend suffered when trying to recall a line from Vergil's Aeneid (Freud, 1901, pp. 8-9).
Is it sheer coincidence that lines from the Aeneid occupy such prominent positions in Freud's two most prominent works? Or is this possibly the tip of an iceberg, which serves to alert us to a subtle series of parallels pointing to an unconscious identification of Freud with Aeneas? In view of Freud's well-documented and self-confessed tendency to identify very intensely with classical heroes, the following parallels become even more striking.
The opening lin