Freud's Acropolis Revisited

Sigmund Freud remains praiseworthy even today for his willingness and readiness—shall we say, need—to expose so much of his personal life, including its intimate features, in order to become his own subject for exploring and testing his developing theories of psychoanalysis. Indeed, his uniqueness in this respect has not been duplicated to the present. Perhaps for this reason the incidents in Freud's life still remain as sources for continued psychological understanding.

However, if we are to assume, with the words of the song in Porgy and Bess, that what is written in the Bible “ain't necessarily so,” as Sigmund Freud himself expounds in Moses and Monotheism (e.g., Moses was an Egyptian), then in a related sense we deserve to be circumspect regarding the clarity and accuracy of his recall and his explanations of various occurrences in his own life as he describes them in his writings.

This approach may be applicable to his labored analysis of his reactions on his trip to Greece in 1904 (Jones, 2:459). During January 1936, Sigmund Freud, approaching 80, completed a paper, entitled “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” dedicated to Romain Rolland on the occasion of the latter's 70th birthday (22:239-248). This brief essay “referred to a piece of self-analysis that illuminated some aspects of Freud's personality, focusing particularly on his relationship with his father” (Jones, 3: 210).

We must admit that a wide survey of the works and journal articles dealing with Freud (and psychoanalysis) did not reveal any material dealing with the incident at the Acropolis. The only other available reference is that by Freud himself (1927). Notably, in a brief mention, he says plainly that he has found another explanation “which did not occur to me at the time … of a wholly subjective nature and has to do with the special character of the place” (21:25). This remark would suggest that an active process of repression took place at the time of the original experience, with the