In Vienna Veritas

Dear Mr Tuckett,

In his paper ‘In Vienna Veritas … ?’ (IJPA 75, 511-583, 1994), Riccardo Steiner quoted (p. 541) Freud’s comment about infantile wishes on p. 553 of The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘If I may use a simile, they are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey—ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood’.

Since there is no mention of tasting blood in the Odyssey (lines 35-7 of Book XI read:‘... I [Odysseus] took the sheep and cut their throats over the pit, and the dark blood ran forth. Then these gathered from Erebus the spirits of those that are dead ...’), I thought perhaps Freud had incorporated another Greek text into his simile. A passage in Oedipus at Colonus seemed a possible candidate; lines 621-2 read: ‘when my slumbering and buried corpse, cold in death, shall one day drink their warm blood’. The speaker is Oedipus and ‘their’ refers to his sons.

While there is no mention of Oedipus at Colonus in The Standard Edition, Peter Gay has written: ‘In late life Freud liked to call his daughter, Anna, his Antigone … It is Antigone who, in Oedipus at Colonus, leads her blind father by the hand—’(1988, p. 92)

Freud recognised his filicidal wishes when he wrote: ‘the concealed impulse … which might have found satisfaction in the dreaded accident to my son; it is the envy which is felt for the young by those that have grown old’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 560).

Strachey said that these lines were added as a footnote in 1919 and incorporated into the text in 1930. If my hypothesis is correct, Freud’s simile would reveal filicidal wishes as well as a wish for immortality. These matters have been discussed at some length in my paper ‘Freud, Odysseus and Middle Age’, which was published in the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2, 19-27, 1994.

Reference

Gay, P. (1988). Freud, a Life for Our Time. London & Melbourne: Dent.

Sincerely yours
James Naiman