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Michael T. O'Brien recently argued in this journal (Vol. 51, 2, 1991) that allusions in Freud's June 4, 1896, letter to Fliess reveal his secret thoughts “of an affair, coitus, and sexual intercourse” (p. 182). In these highlighted allusions, “only ‘fragments’ of a hidden train of thought escape censorship and appear in the manifest content of Freud's text. Freud's theory of repression, however, bids one to examine such allusions as keys to the hidden train of one's ‘real’ thoughts” (p. 182).
Readers are advised to refer to the original article for the full account of O'Brien's theory. My comments focus exclusively on unstated implications also contained in the briefly cited operatic allusions to Don Giovanni, Carmen, and The Marriage of Figaro, mentioned by Freud in sources other than the June 4, 1896 letter, which apparently fail to support his hypothesis.
O'Brien underscored that Freud's letter of May 16, 1897, approaches “what would be the ‘anniversary’ of June 1896,” stressing the specific phrases, “Oh, how glad I am that no one, no one knows,” and “I … feel like the Celtic imp” (Freud, , p. 243). Based on editor Masson's conclusion that “the Celtic imp” seems to be an allusion to the Grimm brothers' tale of Rumpelstiltskin, he then synthesized the essence of the story in connection with his hypothesized (seduction) link to Freud's expectation of Fliess's “astonishment” in the June 9, 1896, letter. O'Brien then wrote:
In the letter following his allusion to Rumpelstiltskin [on May 25, 1897], Freud writes to Fliess that he is sending him the “List of All the Beauties” (p. 245). His allusion here is to Leporello's “Catalogue Aria” in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Leporello,
Page 85the servant of Don Giovanni, in this scene consoles Elvira, one of the women Don Giovanni had seduced and abandoned, by telling her that she is only one of a cast of thousands of such women that Don Giovanni had seduced and abandoned. He reels off, in sprightly fashion, a “long list of Don