Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland

In his last personal letter to Romain Rolland, in May 1930, Sigmund Freud remarked: "I may confess to you that I have rarely experienced that mysterious attraction of one human being for another as vividly as I have with you; it is somehow bound up, perhaps, with the awareness of our being so different' (E. Freud, 1960, p. 406).

Their differences were indeed many and profound. Freud: the Central European, a nonbeliever, a Jew; a scientist, the 'archaeologist' of the mind. Rolland: from the heartland of France, a former Catholic and lifelong mystic; a musician and creative writer; an exponent of Hindu religion; a moralist, pacifist and social revolutionary.

The following communication explores that remarkable relationship, with particular attention to the two areas which linked Freud and Rolland: their mutual concern with the problems of war and peace, and their respective views of Rolland's concept of the 'oceanic experience'.

In order to clarify the Freud–Rolland relationship, certain events and trends in Rolland's productive and tumultuous life must be described, although such a summary must, regretfully, be brief.

Rolland was born in 1866 in the Burgundian town of Clamecy, to an old bourgeois family. His mother, whom he worshipped throughout his life, was highly religious, Jansenistic, a sensitive amateur musician, who had a profound influence on her son. Quite the contrary, Rolland's father, a notary, was a disbeliever, a robust man with a taste for hearty living. At less than one year of age, Rolland developed a severe bronchial infection which left him frail throughout his life and he probably and several episodes of pulmonary tuberculosis. He later observed that 'respiratory expressions' and derivatives of them abound in his writing. When he was five, his three-year-old sister died suddenly, leaving him with perhaps a partially resolved grief, and a debilitating fear for his own life, which lasted until 10 or 12 years of age. Scarcely a night thereaf