Freud, the Oedipus Complex, and Greece or the Silence of Athena

Given Freud's classical education in school where, among other works, he read Sophocles' Ajax and Antigone and then read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex on his own at age seventeen; his love of antiquities as revealed in his extensive art collection, in which out of two thousand pieces many were from Greece and included several portrayals of Oedipus and the Sphinx; and his emphasis on the Oedipus complex as the nuclear complex, one cannot help but wonder why he went to Greece only once. He traveled there with his younger brother Alexander in the fall of 1904. They had intended to go to Corfu, but while they were in Trieste, Italy, a friend suggested that Corfu would be too hot and that the two should go to Athens instead. And so they did. They spent one afternoon and another day on the Acropolis.

Freud referred to the trip in various writings over the years. At the time itself, according to Ernest Jones (1955), he wrote home that “the experience had surpassed everything he had ever seen or could imagine”(p. 26). Jones explains further that in a later letter to Marie Bonaparte, Freud wrote that “the ambercolored columns of the Acropolis were the most beautiful things he had ever seen in his life”(p. 24). In The Future of an Illusion, Freud (1927) wrote that as he stood on the Acropolis, between the temple ruins, looking out over the blue sea, “a feeling of astonishment mingled with joy” came over him (p. 25). He added that this feeling of astonishment seemed to stem from his own surprise that what he was seeing was actually true, just as he had learned at school. But then he made a disclaimer: “My astonishment could have had another explanation, which did not occur to me at the time and which is of a wholly subjective