Well beyond the middle of my life's journey, I embarked on a belated (tardivo) first visit to Rome. With Freud as one of my early heroes who made his own delayed trip to the Eternal City about 100 years before, I wished that magically I might commune with his spirit. I had read one of his personal vacation letters and re-read his essay, “Delusion and Dream,” on Jensen's Gradiva, both written in 1907. In that novella an archeologist, Norbert Hanold, falls in love with a bas-relief of a young woman walking, found in the ruins of Pompeii, which Freud managed to see that same year in the Vatican Museum.
Off I went to the Piazza Colonna which Freud wrote about in his September 22, 1907, letter. He barely mentioned the column honoring the Emperor Marcus Aurelius but detailed an evening in the Piazza, enjoying the evening air, and the music which “worked until nine.” He also noted the insufferable kitschy advertisements projected on a large screen. He commented at the end of his letter that the Roman women appeared “even beautiful when they are ugly.” Feeling lonely in the crowd of a couple of thousand people, he returned “home” (his hotel) to write the letter.
Upon arriving at the Piazza, I immediately saw the tall Aurelius column commemorating in low relief the victories of the Scholar Emperor. Much else was different. The Piazza no longer contains the bandstand, the kitschy advertisements, or the restaurant Freud mentioned. Now cars circled the Piazza replacing the coaches and trams he described.
It is a well-known fact that Freud often visited and wrote about the statue of Moses sculpted by Michelangelo. I went to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli (in chains), home for nearly 500 years of the statue of Moses commissioned by Pope Julius II for his own mausoleum. For a host of reasons, Michelangelo could not complete the statue until 40 years later. Upon its completion, Michelangelo, then about 70, is purported to have thrown a chisel at his creation exclaiming, “Perche non parli?” (“Why don't you speak?”)
I spent about an hour gazing at Moses from every angle as I imagined Freud had done when trying to analyze the motivations of the Jewish lawgiver with whom he was so identified. By close examination of the details of the statue he tried to uncover Moses' emotions as he had begun to interpret his patients' dreams as well as Norbert Hanold's fictional dream and delusion which he traced to a childhood love.
That night I dreamt of the Moses statue, astonished in the dream to see Freud standing silently and ghostlike behind and to the side of Moses. He quickly vanished as I called out to him in my original mother tongue, “Will sie nicht etwas sagen?” (“Will you not say something?”)
Moses, believing I was addressing him, stirred in his seat and asked me, “Why did you stare at me so intensely this afternoon? You reminded me of another visitor, younger than yourself, with a darker beard, better trimmed than yours and certainly than mine.” He told me that the visitor came every day about 100 years ago and seemed to be wondering what he was doing holding the stone tablets at such an awkward angle. Moses went on to say to me that he was resting following his arduous climb down the mountain after receiving the stone tablets from God. When he caught sight of his people still worshipping idols, he was pained and furious. As he was about to rise and rebuke them, he told me, “The tablets slipped from my grasp and I caught them just in time.”
Without a pause I replied, “This man you are recalling was, like yourself, a prophet of sorts. While you freed your people from slavery and gave them laws to live by, this man, whose name was Freud, or Schlomo in Hebrew, son of Jacob, and grandson of Rabbi Schlomo, also tried, a few millennia later, to free mankind from self-imposed enslavements of the mind and its unending expression of and conflicts over aggression. He saw the restraint in your posture indicating the possibility of taming such self-destructive anger. He, like you, also had followers whose disloyalty pained and angered him. In fact the
Fred M. Sander, M.D., is associate clinical professor of psychiatry, Weill-Cornell Medical School, and faculty at the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and psychotherapy training program, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is author of Individual and Family Therapy: Toward an Integration.
same year he wrote an essay about what he felt was your self-control, he was also under a “behind the scenes” attack at a 1913 meeting of German psychiatrists in Breslau.
Once awake, I turned my attention to an upcoming consultation at the Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia (the Academy of Family Therapy) in Rome, arranged by a colleague who had trained with me in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, I was already attempting to integrate psychoanalytic thinking with family therapy and wrote a paper on Freud's use of hypnosis with a family involving a postpartum depression.
While having coffee before going to the Accademia, I vividly imagined Freud sitting across the table. In my mind we spoke about his essays on Gradiva and Michelangelo's Moses. He showed curiosity as well as skepticism about the family consultation I was going to, but he said he would be interested to observe the interview. I imagined walking with him to the consultation and telling him that, according to Maurizio Bettini, the Gradiva story was, in fact, a variation on the Pygmalion myth, which I had been applying to my analytic work with families. Most family members attempt to create others, as Pygmalion did with his ivory statue, in their images of the others. “Yes, indeed,” he might have said, “this is what I described as narcissistic transferences in my 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism.’”
Editor's note: Another article on Fred Sander's visit to Rome will appear in a future issue of TAP.