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Freud’s Trip to Orvieto is a surprising book: part scholarly study, part personal memoir, part analytic diary. The author, Nicholas Fox Weber, directs the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and has previously published fourteen books devoted to twentieth-century artists, including Balthus and LeCorbusier. The inspiration for writing this new work came from an often-quoted memory lapse reported by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1960) as well as in a letter to William Fliess (1986). The episode took place in 1898, when Freud was forty-two years old and had not yet invented the psychoanalytic method. During a trip through Croatia and Bosnia, the young doctor could not recall the name of the artist who had painted the murals in Orvieto cathedral, which he had visited the year before and which had made a tremendous impression on him. Despite blanking on the name, Freud has a clear visual memory of the paintings, which depict scenes from the Last Judgment, including the damned being cast into hell. When he finally remembered the artist’s name — Luca Signorelli — he could suddenly no longer picture the murals in his mind, as if the linguistic block had been replaced by a visual block. In his letter to Fliess, Freud recounted that the memory loss had occurred after a conversation with a traveling companion, a lawyer from Belin, that touched on “death and sexuality.” Years later, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he offered an interpretation of this memory lapse: “I wanted to forget something. I repressed something.”
The episode is well-known among Freud scholars, and it is often quoted as an example of the tricks played by the unconscious — along with slips of the tongue and of the pen — on our daily life. Despite the hundreds of pages that have been written over the years on this famous episode, Weber is right to point out that most analyses have focused almost exclusively on the linguistic elements of the
memory lapse: Freud speculates that by forg