Two unpublished letters to his wife Martha make us aware that Freud's discovery of Michelangelo's Moses came to him with a flash of surprise steeped in a context of death. The publication, in 1914, of an illustrated, anonymous text said to be 'non psychoanalytical', was an essential stage of the long lasting thought process—real, imaginary and symbolical—that proceeded from this discovery.

If we follow Freud's tracks in Rome and in his theoretical progress, we cannot but notice the absence of significant names which were so many milestones in his own relationship to death. This historico-textual course, proposed as an homologue to the theorization of the death instinct, ends up with the picture of the empty tomb, it also being a metaphor of the signifier as a Lacanian logical demonstration.