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So much for [Moses and Monotheism]. … I have been very much besought to write something for Romain Rolland's 70th birthday. … I managed to write a short analysis of “a feeling of alienation” which overcame me on the Acropolis in Athens in 1904, something very intimate. …. But combine the two proverbs about the rogue who gives more and the beautiful girl who will not give more than they have [sic] and you will see my situation.
On June 5, 1938, en route to exile in England, Freud (1856-1939), his wife, Martha, and their daughter Anna stopped off in Paris (June 5), where they had a pleasant twelve-hour visit with his disciple, Marie Bonaparte. By the time they left her home, Freud retrieved from Bonaparte, who had smuggled it out of Austria for him, his 4 1/8-inch bronze statuette of Athena (Jones, , pp. 227-228), the Olympian guardian of Athens, where, on his first and only visit to that immortal city, he had an odd experience in early September 1904:
When, finally, on the afternoon of our arrival I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt it at school!” (Freud, 1936, pp. 240-241, emphasis in original)
The preceding is a quotation from Freud's 1936 Open Letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of the renowned French author's seventieth birthday (January 29), “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” In the Open Letter, Freud offers an analysis of his fleeting disbelief in the material reality of the