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In the summer of 1904 when Professor Freud was forty-eight years old, he and his brother were in Trieste on their way to Corfu for a vacation. At the eleventh hour a friend urged them to go instead to Athens, and although the brothers did not like the idea and felt ill-humored because of it, yet that same evening, not knowing exactly why, they found themselves on a boat bound for Piræus.
They reached Athens and climbed the Acropolis and there, while gazing over the wonderful landscape Professor Freud suddenly had this thought: "So all this really does exist just as we learned it in school!"
The astonishment, Freud reasons, actually implied a falsification of memory. He had never doubted the existence of the Acropolis. But at the moment he did doubt, and even denied the reality of his experience, and projected this denial into the past. It is a retroactive doubt originating in a momentary feeling of estrangement, against which he protected himself by this very memory falsification. When a youth of limited means and tied up with his family, he did not expect ever to have the opportunity of seeing the Acropolis. Now he was seeing it. The resistance against the excursion to Athens and the ill-humor he had experienced before embarking were also manifestations of doubt. It was "too good to be true". His momentary feeling of estrangement, he views as an instance of being "wrecked by success" due to guilt: he had fulfilled a boyhood ambition and surpassed his father.
This experience of thirty-two years ago has just been related by Freud in the 1937 Almanach für Psychoanalyse. Here the author dwells on the subject of estrangement and depersonalization