Sebastiano Timpanaro

Freud’s ‘Roman Phobia’

It is well known that, about the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud had a
persistent desire to visit Rome that was repeatedly frustrated on account of
a neurotic inhibition.* He planned several trips to Rome, and even set out on
some of them, but a powerful phobia stopped him from reaching his goal.
Only on 2 September 1901 did he finally succeed (with unexpected ease,
given the strength of his earlier inhibition) in entering the city of his
yearning; thereafter, he returned to Rome a number of times without
difficulty. Freud makes frequent reference to this phobia of his in The
Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung)1 and in the letters to Wilhelm Fliess
dating from the same period. He recounts incidents from his unsuccessful
trips; he writes of dreams about his desire to reach Rome, about his sadness
in failing to do so and the fear which held him back. He also indicates the
cause, or rather the network of closely interlinked causes, to which he
attributes his inhibition.
4
The Value of Freud’s Own Interpretation

For reasons which I have tried to make clear elsewhere, and which
someday, perhaps, I shall explain more fully,2 the interpretations given
in Freud’s writings of dreams, slips and neurotic symptoms have always
seemed to me among the weakest aspects of his scholarly work (they
are of the greatest interest, on the other hand, if we take them not as
‘interpretations’ but as themselves manifestations of that anguished
hyper-psychologism, that psychic malaise which has so widely afflicted
the more sophisticated and decadent members of the twentieth-century
bourgeoisie). Freud’s greatness, I believe, is much rather the greatness
of Proust, Kafka, Musil or Joyce than that of a great scientist. At the
same time, though in lesser measure, I also believe that Freud made
contributions of real scientific value, and that some even of his
interpretations are highly probable (naturally I do not state that they
are ‘right’, such judgements being the province of the psychologist or
the professional psychiatrist). Among these I would include the expla-
nation which Freud gives of his ‘Roman phobia’.

However, by a turn of events which appears something of a paradox,

orthodox Freudians have not accepted this explanation, and indeed
have not even troubled to refute it, even though, despite their
unquestionable intelligence, they have unhesitatingly gone along with
other interpretations of Freud’s which I would regard as altogether
unprovable and ridiculous. At the best, they have allowed that Freud
gave some tentative ‘beginnings of an interpretation’ but soon aban-
doned it—censoring himself, they imply, from motives of personal
discretion. At the worst, they have flatly denied that Freud offered any

* Dedicated to the memory of Antonio Torelli.

1 References to Freud’s works are to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

Freud, ed. James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press (abbreviated as SE). The Interpretation of Dreams (SE
vols IV–V) is generally referred to by its apter German title, Traumdeutung. The Italian edition of
Freud’s works (Opere, Turin 1967–1980) has occasionally been cited (as O), especially where I am
concerned, not with Freud’s text, but with Cesare Musatti’s Introductions to various volumes. The
letters to W. Fliess (translated into English in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, New York 1954) have
been referred to by their dates. Finally the authors’ surnames alone indicate references to Ernest Jones,
Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, London 1955–57 (3 vols.) and to Marthe Robert, D’Oedipe à Moïse, Paris
1974 (my friend Franco Belgrado brought this work to my notice before the Italian version came out).
Belfagor is a well-known Italian periodical, in which an article by Musatti, to which I frequently refer,
appeared in 1980.
2 Perhaps the reader will forgive me if I refer here to my book Il Lapsus Freudiano (Florence 1974). In

Italy, this has had an almost unanimously hostile reception (and not one psychiatrist has even deigned
to contradict it: they have taken refuge in silence!), whereas in Britain and America it has at least been
discussed, and has met with some agreement (the English translation, by Kate Soper, was published as
The Freudian Slip, NLB, London 1976). Cf. also my new edition of Rudolf Meringer’s 1923 article Die
täglichen Fehler im Sprechen, Lesen und Handeln. This essay, which in my view deserves wide recognition,
first appeared as a reply to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (in Wörte und Sachen, VIII, 1923, pp.
122–141; reprinted, with my translation, notes and Postscript, in Critica Storica, XIX, 1982, pp. 393–
485). My friend Rudolf Führer first drew my attention to this article by Meringer, who anticipates
some of my own comments on the Freudian interpretation of slips. The republication which I edited,
spoilt as it is by numerous printing errors and several inaccuracies of translation, does make clear, in
its notes and in the Postscript, the value of Meringer’s work (and this 1923 article receives less attention
than it should in the study of Meringer, with reference to the interpretation of slips, which Victoria
Fromkin and a group of American fellow-scholars embarked on some years ago); and it also gave me
the opportunity to clarify and amplify various points which I had made in The Freudian Slip.

5
interpretation whatever.3 They have then hastened to proffer, with
varying degrees of self-confidence, interpretations of their own con-
formable to psychoanalytic orthodoxy—and therefore similar to the
weakest put forward by Freud himself!

Freud did impose, especially in The Interpretation of Dreams, censorship

which was not only unconscious, but quite openly intentional. He
frequently brought this to bear where he would otherwise have been
obliged, in the explanation of his own dreams, to disclose excessively
intimate details of his private life and his sexual psychology. We have
his own word for this, both in the Preface to the work’s first edition
(1899) and at various points in the text, one of which has to do with his
reflections on the phobia about Rome.4 However, it is one thing to
leave out references to autobiographical details, even important ones; it
is another to have fabricated an entire interpretation, which Freud
himself would have thought to be false, and which has little kinship
with ‘Freudian’ explanations of the usual type.5 But this, according to
the more ‘moderate’ Freudians, was precisely what Freud did. As to
their more ‘extreme’ colleagues, we have already seen their claim that
he simply refrained from any ‘explicit’ explanation. The zeal of their
Freudian orthodoxy thus leads them to censor Freud’s own text—which
does not seem to me a legitimate procedure.

Roman Weather/Fear of Travelling

One point must be cleared up at the outset. When I speak of ‘Freud’s

interpretation’, I am not referring to the first, very brief note (SE IV, p.
194) in which Freud speaks of ‘reasons of health’ as preventing his
travelling to Rome. Here he has in mind the unwholesome climate
which, exaggeratedly feared as it was by ‘Northerners’, did indeed
afflict the city in late summer and early autumn (the only time of year
when Freud was free to travel). Jones (II, p. 18) and Musatti (O IV, p.
x) are right to reject this explanation as altogether inadequate, though
I do not in all honesty believe we can regard it as nothing but a
rationalization: as we have noted, the unhealthy Roman climate (malaria
and sirocco!) was at this time the subject of widespread and not entirely
groundless fear. The city was bordered by marshes where malaria was
rife, and within Rome itself there remained areas either still affected by
the disease or but recently freed of it. The nineteenth-century Italian
poet Giosue Carducci called for the Goddess Febris, venerated and
feared by the ancient Romans, to return, as if she alone could check the
flood of speculative building let loose by the reclamation of the Roman

3
See the works by Jones and Robert cited in note 1, and also the works which I cite below by Musatti,
Anzieu and Schorske. While these scholars do remark on Freud’s writings about his identification with
Hannibal and his hatred-fear of the Catholic Church as a persecutor of the Jews, they deny, more or
less explicitly, that this is of any value in interpreting Freud’s phobia. Some of them, as we shall see,
advance alternative interpretations; others find it necessary to make additions and corrections to
Freud’s account, and thus, in reality, to alter it profoundly.
4 Cf. SE IV, p. 194: ‘There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail.’
5 This seems to me a legitimate comment, even though I am aware that at the time of the Traumdeutung

psychoanalysis (still in its earliest form) was not yet fully born, though its birth was under way. In this
connection, see also section 6, below.

6
malarial swamps now that the city had become the Italian capital.6
(Carducci, greatly esteemed in his own day for the feeblest of his
verses—those in which, reneging on his youthful Jacobinism, he takes
on the role of laureate to the new monarchical and nationalistic Italy—
still deserves to be read today, when he is no longer the object of such
excessive enthusiasm: as well as his early Jacobin poems, there are
others, inspired by a powerfully felt sadness and regret for the transience
of life’s glory.) The sirocco, a debilitating wind which was itself thought
to cause malaria, was no less feared by robust Northerners. At the time
of the Restoration, the distinguished Prussian historian and politician,
B. G. Niebuhr, who came to Rome as ambassador to the Papal States,
suffered from an obsessional fear of the sirocco, which began before he
arrived in the city and continued for some time afterwards. When he
was first at work on the Traumdeutung, Freud of course had no direct
experience to go on, but when, having overcome his neurosis, he
visited Rome for the first time, he did indeed fall victim to a severe
prostration induced by the sirocco, which ruined the final days of his
stay (letter to Fliess, 19 September 1901). It seems reasonable, then, to
regard his note as a rationalization only in the sense that it was the
exaggeration of a genuine fear: otherwise, it is hard to see why Freud, when
he came shortly afterwards (as we shall see) to set out what he regarded
as the fundamental grounds for his Roman phobia, did not remove his
reference to the unhealthy climate. It must admittedly be conceded that
his exposition taken as a whole is no model of coherence or consistent
development (in this, it is typical of the Traumdeutung, much of whose
fascination derives from its being at once autobiography and ‘treatise’).
However, that Freud retained his note on the climate surely indicates
that he continued to regard it as playing a real part, though a restricted
and secondary one, in the aetiology of his fear of travelling to Rome.

One further preliminary point needs to be made. The ‘Roman phobia’

was a particularly severe manifestation of a more general phobia, to
which Freud was especially subject in his youth but of which he was
never completely cured: a fear of travelling, and notably of travelling
by train. This was by no means an insuperable neurosis, for Freud
travelled extensively, but he had often to suppress a state of anxiety
which sometimes became acute. Jones gives abundant evidence of this
in his biography (I, pp. 14, 197f., 335) but neither he nor any other
scholar (apart from Musatti, in one cursory note) connects it in any way
with the ‘Roman phobia’. Obviously, a fear of travelling in general
cannot account for the much more intense fear of going to Rome, but it is
still worth noting that the latter germinated, so to speak, in the field of
this broader but analogous phobia. If we remember this, we shall see all

6
The Goddess Febris had three temples in Rome, the chief of which was on the Palatine. A well-
known satire of Horace’s (II 6, 18f.) includes the most famous classical literary reference to Rome’s
autumnal malaria, which Horace connects with the sirocco. I point this out, not in order to display my
‘classical erudition’, but because Freud must have been aware of the passage from his secondary school
days. Public health conditions in late 19th-century Rome and its environment are fully discussed in
Angelo Celli, Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia dall’unità al fascismo, ed M. L. Petri and A. Gigli, Milan
1982. (I am grateful to Tomasso Detti for pointing this work out to me.) The Carducci Ode which I
mention is ‘Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla’ (1877): see his Opere, Bologna 1935, pp. 18–19, and see also
the note (p. 152) which he added in 1893.

7
the more clearly how implausible are some of the interpretations of the
Roman phobia which certain Freudians have put forward.
Identification with Hannibal
Let us now turn at last to the real explanation of his ‘Roman phobia’
which Freud gives in the Traumdeutung (V B: SE IV, p. 196f). On his ‘last
journey to Italy’ (in 1897: we must bear in mind that the first edition of
the Traumdeutung came out in 1900), Freud travelled as far as Lake
Trasimene, where he saw the Tiber and where he was only fifty miles
from Rome; but he then felt obliged to turn back. At this point, he
found himself thinking of a piece of writing which included a passage
(referred to further below) concerning Hannibal. ‘I had actually been
following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see
Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had
expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in
these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days.’
Freud now recalls and distinguishes two successive phases of his passion
for Hannibal. In a first stage, he had sided emotionally with the
Carthaginian hero, as had many of his contemporaries. (This had
nothing to do with Hannibal’s Semitic origins, being rather a typical
schoolboy affection for defeated heroes, such as has inclined all of us to
prefer Hector to Achilles, Hannibal to Scipio, and so on: I myself,
though not of Semitic birth, was led by a ‘Hannibalism’ of this kind,
which lasted right into my adolescence, to consume, in indigestible
amounts, the most varied literature on the second Punic war.) In a
second phase, while he was attending the Obergymnasium (secondary
school), Freud’s sense of being isolated in a hostile environment7—
many of his peers were anti-semitic—lent an intenser and more
‘polemical’ tone to his love of Hannibal, whom he now saw as a Semitic
hero, beaten by the Romans but never yielding to them. ‘To my
youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the
tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church.’8
The reader will have remarked that there is in Freud’s account (and it
is clearly evident already in his adolescent feelings) a certain chrono-
logical elision and superimposition. Hannibal’s defeat was due essen-
tially to the inadequate support which he received from his native
country. Though in military genius he outshone the Roman comman-
ders (Scipio included), he had to confront with ever dwindling forces
the combined assault of the Italian legions, which remained (barring
one or two defections) loyal to Rome.9 But the ‘organization’ which
Freud sees as his enemy in the last words of the passage just cited is not
7 This is an interesting piece of evidence, for it reveals that Freud had experienced anti-Semitism
before he ever became a university student, contrary to the account which he gives elsewhere (e.g. SE
XX, p. 9) and which his biographers repeat.
8 Freud also traces his ‘Roman phobia’ to his identification with Hannibal in his letter to Fliess of 3

December 1897.
9
The contrast between Hannibal’s heroic isolation and the strength of the Romans, a contrast
heightened by the envy which the Carthaginians felt towards him, is feelingly drawn in the opening
pages of the Vita by Cornelius Nepos. Cornelius Nepos, who here writes with an absence of ‘Roman
chauvinism’ uncommon in Latin literature, was much studied at school for the stylistic simplicity of his
Vitae; it is thus quite likely that Freud had read him, though I cannot confirm this from any detailed
knowledge of the Latin curriculum taught in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

8
ancient Rome but the Catholic Church, the persectuor of the Jews.
(Freud, growing up amid the extreme Catholicism of the Habsburg
Empire, met with a form of anti-Semitism which was still Catholic, and
more generally Christian, rather than ‘racist’.) In the end, therefore, the
essential emotional opposition was between Hannibal and the Catholic
Church, though Freud did not, of course, overlook the immense
distance between these two in terms of time, ideology and circum-
stances.

All his life, Freud remained convinced that his discovery of a theory so
anti-conformist and ‘revolutionary’ as psychoanalysis had been made
easier by his Jewishness, which involved him in battling against a
conformist, deeply prejudiced ‘compact majority’ hostile to anyone who
chose to differ from it.10 When he joined the Jewish B’nai B’rith
association (in 1926: SE, XX, pp. 246f), he declared quite openly that,
being neither a practising Jew nor a ‘Jewish nationalist’, he felt bound
to the Jewish community, and proud to be a Jew, only because this left
him free ‘from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of
their intellect’. On the other hand, Freud’s Jewish origin, although it
may have helped in the genesis of psychoanalysis, hindered its accept-
ance by the ‘compact majority’, among whom anti-Semitism was
prevalent (ibid). For this reason, Freud strove constantly to enlist non-
Jewish followers, and his initial enthusiasm for Jung owed a great deal
to the latter’s Christian origins: Freud looked to Jung (and to Pfister,
and others) to prevent the spread of psychoanalysis from being checked
by any belief that it was necessarily connected with Judaism, and he
often denied that any such connection existed. Jung’s defection,
however, then confirmed him in his view that psychoanalysis would
have particular difficulty in retaining the allegiance of non-Jews. And
when, under the Nazis, anti-Semitism raged with unprecedented viru-
lence, psychoanalysis was inevitably condemned.11 But we are straying
too far from the time and situation in which the young Freud was
afflicted by his ‘Roman phobia’.
10 Cf. SE XX, pp. 9, 246. In both passages, the phrase ‘compact majority’ (in German, ‘kompakte
Majorität’) is enclosed by Freud himself in inverted commas. This is a quotation, then; and it derives
(as Freud’s editors have noted) from Ibsen, in whose An Enemy of the People a similar expression is
frequently used.
11 Until, in slavish obedience to Hitler, it passed anti-Jewish laws, Italian fascism was not hostile to

psychoanalysis. The inherent potential for such hostility was no doubt there, in that fascism owed its
character to the ‘uncouth’ rather than to the ‘refined’ bourgeoisie; before 1938, however, this was
realized only in a few sporadic outbreaks. Mussolini valued psychoanalysis (though it seems unlikely
that he can have understood it very well), and was a friend of Edoardo Weiss, the ‘father of Italian
psychoanalysis’. In the Enciclopedia Italiana, which was completed before the anti-Jewish laws were
passed, the articles on Freud (XVI, p. 73f) and on psychoanalysis (XXVIII, p. 455ff) were entrusted to
Weiss; since they are not just objective, but sympathetic, Weiss clearly expressed his own ideas
untroubled by the censor. It was through Weiss that Freud sent a piece of his own writing to
Mussolini, accompanying it with a flattering dedication (cf. Musatti, Introduction to O XI, p. xii). I
note this, not for the sake of retailing petty gossip about Freud, but because we should not forget—
though to remember it is painful—that even the most brilliant and humane of bourgeois intellectuals
allowed themselves to be seduced by the image of the ‘strong man’ (see also section 5, below), and
were blinded, by their inveterately anti-democratic and anti-socialist cast of mind, to the coming flood
of fascist barbarism, in which they were to be swept away. Of course we must not forget that in
Stalinist Russia, too, crude ideas of ‘health’ and ‘decadence’, quite at variance with true communist
principles, resulted in the excommunication of psychoanalysis (while leading Trotsky to take an interest
in it).

9
Freud’s equation of Judaism with non-conformity was not altogether
unfounded, but it was certainly overstated and one-sided: throughout
history, after all, there have been people free of prejudice and capable of
revolutionary thought, who have braved persecution and death for
their ideas, and very many of them have been non-Jews. However,
Freud’s intention was less to make a generalized observation than to
defend the claims of those intellectual Jews who had refused to resign
themselves to persecution or to accept their inferior legal and social
status. Freud was not only refusing allegiance to the non-Jewish
‘compact majority’; he was also rebuking the majority of Jews, who
had either endured—and, sometimes, fatalistically accepted—persecu-
tion, discrimination and contempt, or else had submitted to Christian
conversion so that they might be treated (though always within certain
limits) as equals, and had then done everything possible to obliterate
their origins, often displaying an excessive patriotic loyalty towards
whichever state they lived in.12 As Freud came to recognize when he
was ‘about ten or eleven’, his father Jakob was an immediate and, to
him, painful case of such a Jew, ‘resigned’ though not a convert. Indeed
the passage cited above, where Freud speaks of his love of Hannibal
and his hatred of the Catholic Church, is followed at once by his
recollection of the famous incident in which his father told him how a
Christian had humiliated him (seizing his cap and throwing it into the
mud, and ordering him off the pavement) while he, Jakob, had offered
no resistance to this outrage. The young Freud was ashamed and a little
contemptuous of his father’s conduct. He renewed his identification
with Hannibal (at this time, when he was ten or eleven, or initially later,
looking back on the incident?), and regretted that his own father so
little resembled Hamilcar Barca,13 the father of his hero, who had made
his son swear undying hatred of the Romans and had inculcated in him
a spirit not of resignation but of rebellion (SE, IV, p. 197).
The Tragic Destiny of the Isolated Hero
Freud’s sense of his own difference from the ‘compact majority’ was
largely transferred, in adult life, to the ethical-intellectual plane: the
stress fell on his freedom from prejudice, his capacity for original
thought, his non-conformity. But when he was a young child (with
little or no idea of ‘freedom of thought’), it expressed itself in the form
of admiration for warrior-heroes—Cromwell, whose savage heroism
had not prevented him from protecting the Jews; André Masséna, the
great general of the Napoleonic age, who was (or was thought to be) of
Jewish origin; Napoleon himself, whose contradictory political conduct
12 Freud himself was not immune to such excesses, and their sincerity makes his case all the more

melancholy. Early in the Great War, Freud was a keen supporter of Austrian militarism: only when the
horrible massacre dragged on, and it began to look as if the outcome would be unfavourable to the
Central Powers, did he begin to form a more considered and painful view of the phenomenon of war.
(War, that is, between ‘civilized’ peoples, in ‘the great world-dominating nations of the white race’; he
continued to find colonialism unobjectionable: cf. SE XIV, p. 276.) Moreover, even distinguished
Italian intellectuals such as Benedetto Croce and Gaetano De Sanctis, who espoused neutrality during
the First World War, approved of colonial wars, which they saw as advancing the cause of ‘civilization’.
13
In the first edition of the Traumdeutung, Freud, through a slip, wrote ‘Hasdrubal’ instead of
‘Hamilcar’. Freud’s explanation of this slip, given in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, (SE VI, pp.
218–220), is still accepted by the Freudians; it should be compared with the, in my view, simpler and
more convincing explanation in The Freudian Slip, op. cit, p. 165f.

10
towards the Jews had led in some circumstances to their emancipation,
and who was an enemy of the Papacy.14 We shall see that Freud felt a
similar, and very strong, identification with Moses. It has already been
remarked, moreover, that Freud, never content to be a psychiatrist and
an intellectual of the highest repute, always aspired to a ‘quasi-political’
role, as founder and leader of a sect.15 That he did so contrasts, or at
least seems to contrast, with the thorough-going reactionary stupidity
which (pace the Marxist Freudians, and brief lucid intervals apart) he
displayed in all his forays into the field of politics properly so called.16
The identification with Hannibal was thus one of several similar
identifications, though the others were less intense and less deeply
rooted in the unconscious.
All these valiant, isolated heroes were, however, defeated in the end.
Before he died, Cromwell was to see the resurgence of those forces
against which he had struggled with all his might. Napoleon was
vanquished; Masséna, after the reverses he met with in Portugal, went
into sad decline. Above all, Freud’s favourite hero, the great Hannibal
himself, was defeated. He never managed to set foot in Rome—neither
after his victory at Cannae (when instead of attending to the advice of
Maharbal, his cavalry commander, he went to Capua to rest his troops),
nor subsequently. His identification with Hannibal (and to a lesser
extent with the other generals we have mentioned) encouraged Freud
never to yield to the enemy, never to abase himself before him; but at
the same time it betokened defeat, and was thus a source of depression:
history seemed to teach that the solitary hero must come to grief in the
struggle with the ‘organization’ of the mediocre. In the particular case
of Hannibal, Freud’s identification led to a neurotic feeling that it was
impossible for him to reach Rome. Those same obscure forces which
had prevented Hannibal, even at the height of his military success, from
storming the enemy capital and thus winning the war,17 now blocked
Freud’s path, holding him in the grip of an unconscious inhibition.
Places and circumstances connected with Hannibal made him feel
14 SE IV, p. 197f. It is true that Freud does not speak of Napoleon’s at least partly pro-Jewish policies;
rather, he associates him with Hannibal because both men had ‘crossed the Alps’ with an army. This
seems to me an association somewhat artificially thought out after the event, and not a ‘free
association’. It would be nearer the mark to recall that Hannibal and Napoleon have often been
compared for their military genius, which was above all a matter of the extremely rapid movements
which allowed them to take the enemy by surprise. On Napoleon’s attitude to the Jews, see Léon
Poliakoff, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, III, Paris 1968, Ch II, 1.
15 The best discussion of this point is in Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud’s Mission, New York 1972, Ch

VIII.
16 My own views on this are given (together with references to those of earlier scholars) in The

Freudian Slip, pp. 176f, 189–91, 204–206, and passim. I say that there ‘seems to be’ a contrast because
Freud, although he saw very clearly the ‘discontents’ and unhappiness of ‘civilization’, was always
convinced that this bourgeois civilization was the only civilization, to be defended at all costs, and that
psychoanalysis was an intellectually revolutionary doctrine destined to conserve oppression and inequality.
17 Even in Freud’s time, eminent historians (we need only mention Theodor Mommsen) were quite

rightly advancing the view that Hannibal had done well to reject Maharbal’s advice: so long as the
Italian confederation had not disintegrated, any direct attack on Rome would have turned out a costly
failure. School textbooks, however, such as Freud would have used as a boy, must still have spread the
notion (which goes back to Livy, XXII 51, 1–4) that, had Hannibal dared attack, Rome would have
fallen. They thus fostered the idea that he had been held back, not by rational strategic considerations,
but by a neurotic inhibition of his own. At bottom, Freud may have thought that Hannibal, like
himself but centuries earlier, had been the victim of a ‘Roman phobia’ contrasting with his burning
wish to defeat Rome.

11
particularly inhibited. On his journey of 1897, it was when he arrived at
the shore of Lake Trasimene that Freud felt obliged to turn back; and
it was at Trasimene that Hannibal had won, a year before Cannae, a
crushing victory against the Romans (and then, too, some classical
sources—for instance, Livy XXII 8,7—recount that he shrank from
launching an attack on Rome itself). On his way back, Freud was
already hatching a plan for the following year, thinking he would ‘by-
pass Rome . . . and travel to Naples’. This, clearly, is an attempt to
‘cheat’ the phobia, by treating Rome not as the too-much-longed-for
goal but as a mere staging-post, which might then provoke less tension.
At the same time, the plan partly imitates Hannibal’s movements after
Cannae, when, without of course passing through Rome, he went to
Campania; and in this ‘imitation’ we may trace Freud’s premonition
that he himself will fail to reach Rome. The ‘Roman phobia’ arose,
then, from an unconscious thought (of which Freud then became
conscious): ‘What Hannibal never accomplished, I shall not accomplish
either.’ It was reinforced by his fear and hatred of Catholic Rome for its
persecution of the Jews, and fits into the framework of a more general
way of thinking: ‘I have chosen the role of solitary hero, and am proud
of it, but I feel that it is my destiny to be defeated.’
Freud and his Father
When we come to discuss the interpretations of the ‘Roman phobia’
given by some Freudians, we shall have occasion to note other aspects
of Freud’s attitude to Rome. First, however, I should like to clear up
the question of whether the phobia can be traced to ‘oedipal’ feelings of
hatred towards the father. This has been suggested by Marthe Robert,
though her treatment is allusive rather than explicit, and she makes
little of the properly sexual aspect of the relation to the father. (We shall
see, moreover, that her attempted explanation is altogether more
complex.) Such an interpretation may seem plausible a priori. The
Traumdeutung, which contains the description and explanation of the
‘Roman phobia’, is, as we all know, Freud’s most autobiographical
work, and much of it stems from the self-analysis which he undertook
from 1897 onwards (a fact also confirmed by the constant parallels
between the book and Freud’s letters to Fliess). More specifically, Freud
considered that the work had originated in feelings and reflections
aroused in him by the death of his father: in his Preface to the second
edition (SE, IV, p. xxvi) he writes that the book ‘was, I found, a portion
of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death—that is to
say, to the most important event, the most poignant, of a man’s life’.
Those words of ‘traditional’ piety, speaking of his father’s death as the
great grief of each man’s life, cannot be taken altogether straightfor-
wardly and literally, any more than the full state of Freud’s mind can be
safely inferred from the brief words of orbituary in which he breaks the
news to Fliess (2 November 1896). To be sure, Freud always expressed
himself in the most ‘traditional’ manner as regards filial love and
respect,18 and it is this tradition which underlies the claim that it is the
18
Respect for the father, or for ‘old age’ in general, old people being themselves paternal figures. Cf.
for example SE VI, p. 83: ‘There are powerful internal punishments for any breach of the respect due
to age (that is, reduced to childhood terms, of the respect due to the father).’

12
father’s death, rather than the mother’s, which causes the greatest grief.
His teachings, however, tell a different story, stressing above all the
hatred which the son feels towards the father—because of sexual
jealousy, and because he feels thwarted by the father’s repressive
authoritarianism—and according much less importance to love (which
flows from the need for protection and the desire for identification). In
the oedipal situation, sorrow at the father’s death is not ruled out; but
it derives primarily, as is known, from remorse at having hated someone
whom, according to conventional morality, one should have loved. In
Totem and Taboo, moreover, it will be seen to derive directly from
remorse over the murder of the father by the primitive horde.
Certainly it has been previously noted that, at the time of the letters to
Fliess and the writing of the Traumdeutung, the oedipal theory was still
evolving slowly in Freud’s mind. I am less certain whether it has been
recognized (probably it has; but I shall remark on it nonetheless, since
it bears directly on my present argument) that, although in the fully
developed oedipal theory incestuous love of the mother and hatred of
the father are connected and complementary, the two themes did not
unfold pari passu in Freud’s thoughts. In some notes enclosed with his
letter to Fliess of 31 May 1897, Freud writes that the wish for one’s
parents’ deaths plays a major part in neurotic illness, and goes on to
specify that in men this wish is focused on the father, in women on the
mother. He adds that sorrow at the death of one’s parents is attributable
to remorse for previous hatred. Here, the formulation of the oedipal
theory seems already quite advanced, though we should note that Freud
draws his observations, not from self-analysis, but from clinical practice
(not that this can be attributed entirely to reticence: his observations on
the mother–daughter relationship could obviously have no basis in
self-analysis). Writing to Fliess a few months later (3–4 October), Freud
does draw on his self-analysis, recalling with great clarity—although his
sense of decorum obliges him to use a Latin phrase—how as a child he
wanted to possess his mother, and remembering the circumstances in
which this desire had made itself most strongly felt. But this time
jealousy of the father is not invoked; indeed, it is ruled out. ‘My father
played no active role’, wrote Freud of the origin of his own neurosis,
which he claimed was to be attributed instead to the sayings and
behaviour of an unattractive Catholic nurse, who was later even to
prove herself a thief.
Only in the letter of 15 October 1897, after saying something more
about this same nurse, does Freud add: ‘I have found love of the mother
and jealousy of the father in my own case too’ (my emphasis). It seems
clear that jealousy of the father, unlike incestuous love of the mother,
was not something which Freud discovered in the first place through
self-analysis. Rather, having observed it—or believing he had observed
it—in other people (his patients: see the first of the letters to Fliess
which we have cited), he then ‘found’ it (since he was searching for it)
in himself. But this was not spontaneous and involved a certain
straining.
The fact is that Jakob Freud, to judge by his son’s account—which in
this case is much better documented and interpreted by Marthe Robert,
13
Ch. 1 and passim, than by Jones and other scholars—in no way
corresponded to the type of father who makes the oedipal situation
seem credible. Whether the little boy is to love him as a protector and
a model for emulation, or to hate him because of the fear inspired by
his forbidding authoritarianism and because he is a rival for possession
of the mother, the father of the Freudian account is at all events a strong
type of man. Now, as we have already seen, the young Freud was
indeed unable to approve of his father, but this was because he despised
his weakness. His father was the resigned Jew who, in contrast to the
father of Hannibal, passively submitted to the insults of an overweening
Christian. Telling the story to his son, he did not even suspect that his
authority and prestige as a father might suffer, but actually believed that
the boy might take heart from the long-past episode, since if the
situation of the Jews was still not enviable, it was better than it had
been at the time when such bitter humiliations were commonplace.19
Then again, Jakob came from a family some of whom had been
mentally retarded, mad or epileptic (see the letter to Martha of 10
February 1886), and was thus at least indirectly responsible for having
brought into the world children, among them Sigmund, who were
predisposed to hereditary nervous ailments. He had abandoned Jewish
Orthodoxy, but had made no place for himself in the culture of his
times. Even the child in earliest infancy would be hard put to feel sexual
jealousy towards such a father: hence Freud’s remark in his earlier letter
to Fliess, his delay and difficulty in noting the ‘paternal element’ in his
oedipal complex.

No doubt Jakob Freud was indeed beloved by his son, though this
cannot have been the ‘respectable’ sentiment professed in the Preface to
the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. Nor, however, can it
have been love either of a father-protector (Jakob being too weak to
give his son such security) or of a father-model (emulate a humiliated
Jew who had been made ashamed of his own Jewishness? Never!). It
was, in the event, a love imbued with compassion for his father’s
weakness. In the letter which he wrote to Fliess immediately after his
father’s death, and which we have already cited, Freud spoke of his
father’s mixture of deep wisdom and ‘imaginative lightheartedness’.
The ‘wisdom’ is the ancestral wisdom of the persecuted and humiliated
Jew, who nonetheless survives; the ‘lightheartedness’ is surely close kin
to that irony and self-irony which have given so many Jews some
escape from their bitter lot, and underlay that plethora of much-loved
anecdotes and jokes which inspired his own book on Witz (Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, SE, VIII). Nonetheless, even if he did not
always despise these sides of his father’s character, even if he understood
and indeed loved them in the manner we have just suggested, Freud
would certainly have preferred a ‘strong’ father.20 In the course of a
dream which occurred after his father’s death, and to which Freud twice
refers in the Traumdeutung (SE, V, pp. 428, 447), Jakob Freud becomes an
19
Freud writes (SE IV, p. 197) that Jakob Freud ‘told me a story to show me how much better things
were now than they had been in his days’ (that is, in the days of his youth).
20 Jakob Freud’s comment, ‘The boy will come to nothing’, which he is supposed to have made when

his son committed some act of childish indecency (SE IV, p. 216), hardly entitles us to regard him as an
authoritarian father. Overall, he appears a mild and indulgent figure.

14
eminent politician and resolves a dangerous crisis in Hungary; Freud
also recalls that his father, on his death bed, resembled Garibaldi, and
this makes him glad. Carl E. Schorske21 claims that this is a ‘father
rehabilitation’ dream. In reality, it is a dream reflecting a wish for the
father’s rehabilitation; it confirms that Freud would have liked a
pugnacious and energetic political leader as a father.22 The resemblance
to Garibaldi may put one in mind of the fact (to which admittedly
Freud does not refer) that he, like Hannibal, tried in vain, in 1860 and
1867, to conquer Rome. Those who are bent on proving Jakob Freud
responsible for his son’s ‘Roman phobia’ ought to restrict themselves
to the thesis that Jakob, by reason of his docile temperament, and
notwithstanding Freud’s determination not to follow in his footsteps,
had a demoralizing effect upon his son and undermined his faith that he
might become ‘a hero like Hannibal’. In the first place, however, this
would have nothing to do with the neurosis-inducing influence of the
father in the oedipal situation; and secondly, Freud’s demoralization
had its origin, not in his father’s resignation in the face of abuse, but
precisely in the fact that defeat had overtaken the ‘strong men’ (above
all, Hannibal) with whom Freud had identified.

In an interview given in 1957 to Richard I. Evans, Jones depicts Jakob

as a lively, happy man, a free thinker ‘just like Freud’ (and he uses very
similar expressions in his biography of Freud, which had just been
completed). Just because they did resemble one another and enjoy the
best of relations, it must have been very difficult, Jones adds, for Freud
to discover that there was a secret hatred of his father within himself.23
This portrait of Freud’s father is in large measure false, for it exaggerates
certain aspects of his character while saying nothing of the profound
differences and dissimilarities between him and his son. But, mistaken
as his motives may have been, Jones too realizes that it would be
difficult to trace the idea of father-hatred to any source in Freud’s self-
analysis.

I believe, like many others, that while the mother–son relation depicted
in the oedipal situation has some basis (though I would prefer to speak,
not of an ‘incestuous’ relation, for this is a distortion, but of a profound
‘biological’ tie), the ‘hatred of the father’ is an arbitrary biologistic
generalization of a historical fact which has its roots in the patriarchalism
of the traditional monogamous family. Ill-conceived from the start, this
notion of Freud’s degenerated further on being ‘mythologized’ and
projected into humanity’s prehistory in Totem and Taboo. Many commit-
ted Freudian analysts today quite rightly reject this component of
Freud’s teaching, or accept it only in limited form. But should we wish
to know who provided the model for the father-figure in Freud’s self-
21 ‘Politique et psychanalyse dans l’ “Interprétation des rêves” de Freud’, in Annales XXVIII (1973), p.

323f.
22 Even in the dream itself, the ‘rehabilitation’ is only partial: Freud’s dream includes a memory of how

the dying man stained the bed-linen. This fact, then, which puts him in mind of death’s weakness and
squalor, at once breaks in to disrupt the image of his father⫽Garibaldi.
23 The reference is to p. 136f. of the Italian volume, C. G. Jung, Psicoanalisi o psicologia analitica? . . . con

una replica di E. Jones, Rome 1974. The latest edition of R. E. Evans, Conversations with Carl Jung . . .
(New York 1964) has been revised, and appears as Jung on Elementary Psychology (London 1979): the
reactions of Jones, given in the earlier volume, are no longer included.

15
analysis (or perhaps we should rather say, in his autobiography), we
must conclude, I believe, that it was not Jakob Freud, but Sigmund
Freud! He appears as an overweening ‘castrating’ patriarch, not in his
relations with his own children, but in the tyranny he exercised over his
male pupils (while with his female pupils he sustained quite different, if
sublimated, relationships); here, as Professor Sigmund Freud, he
destroys every trace they show of independent scientific personality,
and is quick to punish dissidents—excommunicating them, expelling
them from the psychoanalytic community, hating them. The ‘Laius
complex’, as Devereux has aptly termed it, precedes the supposed
Oedipus complex, and is the most ignoble and hateful aspect (even
though Freud himself certainly took no joy in it) of a personality we
must nonetheless call heroic, given the courage with which Freud
resisted adversity and endured the appalling miseries of his illness in the
last years of his life.24 To return to our argument, however: in no way,
except in the very indirect and ‘non-oedipal’ sense which we have
noted, can Jakob Freud be held responsible for his son’s ‘Roman
phobia’.

The Meaning of Rome for Freud

A number of Catholics and Catholic sympathizers have attempted to

show that a repressed desire for conversion to the Catholic Church
underlay the ‘Roman phobia’. The falsity of such reasoning has been
amply demonstrated by Jones (1, p. 19f), by Marthe Robert (p. 188,
albeit with a captious theoreticism entirely unnecessary in the circum-
stances), and by Musatti.25 I shall not discuss it further here. It will
emerge in the course of my subsequent argument that I view this pious
hypothesis as being even more baseless than do the scholars to whom
I have referred.

A second interpretation, which has been much more widely accepted,

makes its first appearance in Jones (11, p. 20) and is later developed by
Marthe Robert, especially in Chapters II–IV—with her usual intelli-
gence and stylistic virtuosity, but also with the excessive esprit de finesse
which leads her to obscure the essential terms of a problem. As we shall
see, this interpretation, further developed, is also to be found in
Schorske and in Musatti.

Freud’s ‘longing’26 to visit Rome reflects, so these scholars argue, his

ambivalence towards a place which he loved and hated with equal
24 Anyone who admires Freud, but wishes to keep their admiration this side of idolatry, must make a
distinction between the heroic and the mean and hateful aspects of his character as a man. It must also
be admitted, I believe, that while these two parts of his human personality were opposed, they were
nonetheless also complementary. Both had their source in a fundamental aggressiveness, which gave
Freud the strength to bear the hostility of men and of nature, but also prevented him from tolerating
any disagreement or having any respect for other people’s personalities.
25
Musatti refers briefly to the Catholic interpretation in O IV, p. xi, expressing no view on it. In
Belfagor 1980, p. 695f, he rejects it, however, decisively—and rightly.
26
‘Longing’ precisely renders Freud’s word, Sehnsucht. The Italian edition (O III, p. 185) has ‘nostalgia’
(Italian nostalgia), which does correspond to one meaning of Sehnsucht, but is misleading in this context,
since it suggests a ‘desire to return’, a sense of ‘missing one’s home’, which Freud—as we shall shortly
see—could not have felt in respect of Rome. A few pages earlier, moreover (p. 183), the same word
Sehnsucht, in an altogether similar context, is correctly rendered as ‘ardent wish’ (Italian ardente desiderio).

16
intensity. Jones states that (apart from the ‘third Rome’, the modern
capital of Italy) there are ‘two Romes’ in Freud’s mind: ‘There is ancient
Rome, in whose culture and history Freud was deeply steeped, the
culture that gave birth to European civilization . . . Then there is the
Christian Rome that destroyed and supplanted the older one. This could
only be an enemy to him, the source of all the persecutions Freud’s
people had endured throughout the ages.’ Marthe Robert dwells at
length on this ambivalence. She calls attention to Freud’s excellent
education in the classics, to the contribution made to Greek and Latin
studies by German Jewish scholars, to the fact that Freud felt himself as
much a part of modern European culture (‘the other side’) as of Jewish
tradition, to his taste for collecting antique works of art (it is not known
of what value or authenticity, but that hardly matters), and to his
desire—linked to his quest of an academic career and a scientific
reputation—to be accorded full equality by the ‘other side’ without,
however, paying the price of a pretended Christian conversion.

All this is fair enough, but it leads Robert to overlook the point that
she herself makes so well towards the end of Chapter II, where she
remarks that for Freud the Jewish and the ‘European’ elements in his
background were not of equal status. The former were primary,
instinctive, much more deeply rooted in his psyche; the latter were
something he had acquired, and which had far less emotional signifi-
cance for his underlying personality. Only in these terms can we explain
what we have already noted and what Robert herself sets out clearly in
Chapter I: namely, the fact that Freud, though an atheist and not a
Zionist, felt himself engaged in single-handed combat with the institu-
tions of the majority, a majority stronger than him (as it had been
stronger than Hannibal) both numerically and organizationally, but
inferior to him in intellect and in morality; and the fact, also, that he
was convinced only a Jew could have founded psychoanalysis. Robert,
moreover, like Jones, ascribes to Freud a passion for ancient Rome far
beyond what can legitimately be inferred from the evidence. During
Freud’s youth the intelligentsia of Europe, and especially of Central
Europe, admired Rome much less than Greece.27 Jones, meanwhile, in

27 Jacob Bernays (an Orthodox Jew, and the uncle of Freud’s future wife) was much more a Greek
scholar than a Latinist. Theodor Gomperz, whom Freud admired and who helped him in his academic
career, was a student of Greek philosophy. During the very period of his ‘Roman phobia’, Freud read
J. Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte, and also a biography of Schliemann (letter to Fliess, 21
December 1899). German-speaking intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt a
particular affinity, which they expressed in various ways, between Germany and ancient Greece.
Theodor Mommsen, one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, was never really able to appreciate
Latin culture and literature. It is true that when Latin studies revived, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, this was due largely to the work of German Jewish scholars (see Arnaldo
Momigliano, Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Rome 1960, pp. 420, 423). However, the
atmosphere of this revival was not one of ‘patriotic’ or rhetorical partiality for Rome; rather, the
Romans were admired for their ability to absorb Greek culture, which they had not slavishly imitated,
but had developed with an originality which freed them of any suspicion of ‘native’ backwardness.
One great German Jewish Latinist, Eduard Norden, never quite freed himself of his tendency to
undervalue Latin literature. Only in the aftermath of the First World War did a rhetorical idealization
of Rome—whose tones anticipated Nazism—begin to make itself heard (see Antonio La Penna, Orazio
e l’ideologia del principato, Turin 1963, pp. 15–21). Of course, this whole theme deserves much fuller
treatment, and has in part been given it; however, I felt it necessary here to offer a caution against the

17
his zeal to set up an opposition between an ancient Rome which Freud
loved and a counter-Reformation Rome, which he detested, quite
forgets that the sworn enemy of Hannibal was none other than ancient
Rome!28

A careful reading of all the passages in which Freud refers to his

‘Roman phobia’ obliges us to state that he never speaks of feeling any
love of Rome. His ‘longing’ to visit the city is the longing, not of a
lover, but of a conqueror bent on storming an enemy fortress. To be
sure, he never actually envisaged a military expedition, only a bloodless
tourist trip of the kind which he in fact made once the phobia had come
to an end. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the neurosis sprang from a
desire for revenge and reparation (his desire to realize, as a Semite, the
conquest of Rome which Hannibal had failed to achieve), and also from
fear that the ‘compact majority’ would turn out, once again, to have the
upper hand. There is no basis in reality for language such as Musatti
uses when he writes (O, IV, p. 11) of a ‘neurotic conflict between a great
love of Rome and an invincible fear of the city’.

Nor is there any hint of love for Rome in the dreams bearing on the
‘Roman phobia’ which are recounted in the Traumdeutung.29 In some of
them, the desire to reach Rome is expressed together with sorrow at
failing to do so—so that these may be termed ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’,
provided we note that the wish is already frustrated in the dream itself. In
others, Rome figures as a persecutor, hated and feared. Before revealing
his identification with Hannibal, Freud narrates four of these dreams
(SE, IV, pp. 194–96).

(a) Freud sees the Tiber and the Ponte S. Angelo from the window of
a train; but the train moves off before he is able to get out. No sooner
has he reached Rome, then, than it slips away from him.

(b) ‘Someone’ takes him up a hill and points to Rome veiled in clouds,
distant but at the same time clearly visible. Here again we have both the
wish and the impossibility of its satisfaction. In this dream, Freud says,
‘the theme of the promised land seen from afar was obvious’ (p. 194).
Freud is in fact identifying with Moses (and this is perhaps the first
tendency of Jones, and still more of Robert, to represent Freud’s background as one in which no
distinction was made between an enthusiasm for Greece and an enthusiasm for Rome. It is also
noticeable that when, in later life, Freud developed a stronger interest in mythology, it was to the
Greek myths that, almost without exception, he turned. (Cf. the collective volume, Psychanalyse et
culture grecque, Paris 1980; a book, however, which promises more than it performs.) See also note 32,
below.
28 Jones is partly, and only partly, justified in making use of this kind of chronological superimposition:

see our remarks above.

29 I discuss these dreams only in terms of their relevance to the Roman phobia. Nonetheless, there is

a good deal of arbitrariness, and sometimes of absurdity, in the more detailed analyses which various
other scholars have made of them. Robert takes a few steps along this dangerous path, which is
followed to its very end by Didier Anzieu, L’auto-analyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychanalyse, Paris
1975. Anzieu thinks himself entitled, not to ‘explain’ the dreams which Freud recounts, but to ‘develop’
them by way of a whole series of invented associations of which there is not the faintest trace in Freud.
He appears to have had the remarkable good fortune of bringing Freud back to life and putting him
through an analysis. (I am here making an internal criticism: for my part, I am extremely doubtful about
the method of psychoanalysis, but in my view even those who believe in it firmly must reject Anzieu’s
procedures.)

18
reference to the veritable ‘obsession with Moses’ which would grip
Freud throughout his life and lead him, decades later, to write The Moses
of Michelangelo and, finally, Moses and Monotheism). Once more, as with
Hannibal, he was identifying with a heroic Semitic ‘fighter’ destined
never to reach his goal: God showed Moses the land of Canaan, but
Moses died before he could set foot in it. Nor can the expression
‘promised land’ be taken to imply a love of Rome. As Robert rightly
points out (p. 180), the land promised to the Jews was the habitation of
‘unknown and primitive idolators, steeped in superstition and doomed,
for that reason, to be exterminated’. In the same way, the land promised
to Freud–Moses is enemy territory; Rome, just like Canaan before the
Jews arrived there, is ‘promised’ as an object of conquest and a prize of
victory (the most ‘savage’ books of the Old Testament are those which
tell how Joshua and his successors conquered Palestine: the Jews
massacre entire peoples at the instigation of a vengeful God, in whose
eyes compassion towards the enemy is the gravest of sins, bringing
terrible punishments in its wake). Freud, we might well say, feels
towards Rome a ‘Mosaic hatred’ similar to his ‘Hannibalistic hatred’.
This hatred was felt much more intensely at the unconscious level than
it was consciously, since for all his loathing of Rome as the persecutor
of the Jews, Freud never entertained the remotest idea of carrying out
any ‘pogrom in reverse’. However, it was precisely this deep-seated
paroxysm of unconscious hatred which, combined with his doubts as to
whether he would be able to conquer the ‘promised land’, engendered
Freud’s phobia.

(c) Freud thinks for a while that he is in Rome, but soon realizes that he
is actually in Ravenna, ‘which I have visited and which, for a time at
least’—during the reign of the Emperor Honorius, in the fifth century—
‘superseded Rome as the capital of Italy.’30 As in the first dream,
disillusionment follows swiftly upon illusion. By way of various
associations which need not detain us here, Freud is put in mind of two
anecdotes about Jews in distress striving laboriously to reach their
destination. Amidst various other ‘non-Roman’ elements which make
an appearance in this second part of the dream, we have once again
what might be called a synthetic reference to the impossibility for the
Jew—the persevering but weak and vulnerable Jew—of reaching
Rome.

(d) Once again Freud dreams he is in Rome, but realizes that he is in

Prague. Here, together with disappointment because the goal has not
been reached, there is, as Freud makes explicit, a feeling of insecurity,
Prague being at that time a city hostile to the subject Germans of the
Austrian Empire. There is also—Freud is less explicit here, but the
supposition seems reasonable to me—a memory of his first experience
of coming into contact with an anti-Semitic community, an experience
dating from Freud’s childhood in Moravia (or deriving, we should
perhaps rather say, from family conversations, for although he was born
at Freiberg, in Moravia, Freud moved when he was only three to
30
According to Anzieu (cf. preceding note), ‘Ravenna’s attempt to supplant Rome, which ends in
failure, is a symbol of the son’s attempt to supplant the father.’ (See my comments at the end of note
29. I quote from the Italian ed., L’autoanalisi di Freud . . ., Rome 1976, I, p. 215.)

19
Leipzig, and then to Vienna). Prague thus represents a double disadvan-
tage: it is not Rome, but, like Rome, it is a hostile city; and Freud is no
conqueror, but someone threatened by danger.
Still more striking is a dream recounted elsewhere in the Traumdeutung
(SE, V, pp. 441f), which begins: ‘On account of certain events which had
occurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to remove the
children to safety, and this was done.’ As Freud himself explains (see
also p. 444), and as is in any case obvious, the dream reflects the Jew’s
anxiety, not only for himself, but even more so for his children, who
face a future of insecurity and persecution. But it is by no means
fortuitous that the dream’s ‘certain events’—measures of State, ‘popular’
anti-Semitic agitation, threats of pogrom—take place in Rome.
Although at the time of Freud’s youth Rome, despite the Pope’s
presence, was one of the least anti-Jewish cities in the world, in which
Jews ran no particular risks, for Freud it always remained the uncon-
scious symbolic city of anti-Semitism. The rest of the dream takes place
in Siena, a Siena linked and to some extent identified, by way of
confused associations, with Rome (once again) and also with Babylon—
another city hostile to the Jews, which was for them a place of
banishment.
The Irony of ‘Next Easter in Rome’

A further attempt to link discussion of the ‘Roman phobia’ with the

idea of a love of Rome is based on certain passages in the letters to
Fliess which seem to suggest an equation of Rome with Jerusalem.
(Jones dismisses this too hastily, in my view—see 11, p. 19; but Musatti,
when he takes it up—O, IV, p. xif.—does so with unhappy results.)
Before he had overcome the phobia, Freud wrote repeatedly to Fliess
(6 February and 27 August 1899, 30 January 1901) that he wished to
spend Easter in Rome, but had no confidence that he would be able to
do so. Musatti notes that the Jews of the Diaspora used to greet each
other, at the end of the Passover period, with the phrase: ‘Next year in
Jerusalem!’, even though no actual custom of visiting Jerusalem for
Passover corresponded to the greeting, which had become a purely
symbolic evocation of the Jewish homeland. Musatti also claims
(rightly, in my view) that Freud is alluding to this expression when he
writes in his letter to Fliess of 14 April 1900: ‘If I closed with “Next
Easter in Rome”, I should feel like a pious Jew.’*
Musatti concludes from this that Freud felt his journey to Rome to be
a ‘return to the fatherland’, exactly equivalent to a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. This is verging on the absurd, for now, not content with
stating that Freud had ambivalent feelings about Rome (which he hated
as a persecutor of the Jews and a symbol of the ‘compact majority’, but
loved because of its significance for the Western culture in which he felt
he shared), Musatti would have us believe directly in a love of the city,
a love not cultural, but ancestral. If we had time to waste on this kind
of speculation, we might perhaps wish to attribute some such sentiment
to a Jew like Graziadio Ascoli, the great linguist who endeavoured to
* In both German and Italian the same word can be used for ‘Easter’ and ‘Passover’. (Trs. note).

20
establish that the Semites and the Indo-Europeans shared a common
origin, and whose hypothesis of the ‘Aryan-Semitic link’—as he called
it—would thus have enabled him to declare himself, and every other
Jew, to be related not only culturally but by blood to the Romans. But
everything that we have so far demonstrated indicates that in Freud’s
consciousness—and still more so in his unconscious—the sense of being
a Jew was felt at an altogether different level from the sense of being a
‘European’.

My own view is that Freud uses these expressions about ‘Easter’ with
an ironic and paradoxical intention. This may be fairly straightforward:
the ‘devout Jew’, the religious Jew which he was not and which he
always insisted he was not, is thinking of spending Easter in the anti-
Jerusalem itself. It may be more subtle and sarcastic: to go and spend
Easter in the very heart of the enemy fortress would be, would it not,
one more symbolic Jewish victory of the ‘Hannibalistic’ type? A similar
witticism (drawing an analogy, this time, with Catholicism as well as
with Judaism) is to be found in an addition to the Traumdeutung made
in 1925 (SE, IV, p. 194), and written long after the phobia had been
overcome: ‘and thereafter I became a constant pilgrim to Rome’.

It seems to me that Musatti, although, as we have seen in an earlier

section, he quite rightly rejects the Catholicizing interpretation of the
‘Roman phobia’, falls victim to that very interpretation insofar as he
takes seriously Freud’s remarks about Easter. The fact is that only a
Christian can see Jerusalem and Rome as the two ‘holy cities’, and only
a Christian can equate them: such an equation is impossible for a Jew,
whether religious or free-thinking, so long as he is proud of his own
Jewishness. We had better watch out, or we shall find ourselves obliged
to take seriously the addition to the Traumdeutung which we have just
quoted, and we shall be convinced that Freud overcame his phobia the
moment he was able to see his journey to Rome as a Catholic
‘pilgrimage’!

A passage from the Traumdeutung which is certainly of interest, but of

which Schorske (see note 21 above) has made too much, as has Marthe
Robert (who follows him too far, though not the whole way), concerns
a reminiscence which came into Freud’s mind just before he recognized
that the cause of his phobia lay in his identification with Hannibal. The
reminiscence was of a few lines from ‘one of our classical authors’ (later,
in 1925, Freud thought that he had read them in Jean-Paul Richter, but
he was not certain of this and did not try to find the passage):31 ‘Which
of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the

31 SE IV,p. 196, n.l: ‘The author in question must no doubt have been Jean Paul.’ However Freud’s
German (Gesammelte Werke, II/III, p. 202, n.l) reads: ‘Der Schriftsteller, bei dem ich diese Stelle las,
muss wohl Jean Paul gewesen sein’; and ‘wohl’, in such a context, means ‘likely’ rather than ‘no
doubt’. So far as I know, the phrase has not been found in Jean Paul’s works. Winckelmann was
‘Vice-Principal’ (Konrektor) of the Gymnasium at Seehausen from 1743 to 1748. He did not go to
Rome immediately at the end of this period, but was first occupied for some time at Dresden, as a
librarian (cf. Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Genossen, Cologne 1956, I, p. 137f). Since it was at
Dresden that he received the invitation to go to Rome, and was converted to Catholicism, Jean Paul
condenses matters very considerably in his account.

21
greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome—
Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-
Chief?’ (SE, IV, p. 196). The phrase is ironic and precisely for that
reason its meaning is not clear, even in the German (‘Es ist fraglich, wer
eifriger in seiner Stube auf und ab lief, nachdem er den Plan gefasst, nach Rom
zu gehen, der Konrektor Winckelmann oder der Feldherr Hannibal’: Gesammelte
Werke, 11/111, p. 202). We may certainly imagine Freud, and perhaps also
the author of the words which he records, marking the contrast between
the two figures. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great archaeologist
and historian of ancient art, willingly and without any disturbance to
his conscience or evidence of real religious feeling converted from
Protestantism to Catholicism, solely in order to obtain, at Rome, the
post first of Librarian and later of Keeper of Antiquities—which
enabled him to pursue his study of Greek art. Hannibal, bent on
entering Rome as the avenging conqueror, never in fact arrived there.
We may also (tentatively!) conjecture that Freud gave some thought to
the price paid by a Jewish intellectual unwilling, as he was, to go
through a pretended conversion—a price paid, at that time, not in
outright persecution but in obstacles to one’s career, hostile reception
of one’s ideas, and so on. At all events, Freud—to go back to the lines
in question—followed the example of Hannibal and not of Winckel-
mann. Here, I think, we must call a halt if we are not to indulge in
novel-writing, either by presenting Freud as deeply torn between loyalty
to Judaism and love (yet again) of Rome, or by exaggerating out of all
proportion the similarities between Winckelmann and Freud and thus
attributing to the latter a dramatic, barely repressed ‘leaning to
Winckelmannism’.32

Obsessive Preparations as an Index of Anxiety

None of this psychologism allows either Jones, or Robert, or any of the

other scholars with whose work I am acquainted to arrive at an
‘orthodox Freudian’ explanation of Freud’s phobia as based in infantile
sexuality. Jones must have thought along these lines (see the account
below), but he remains reticent. It is Musatti, in fact, who offers the
explicitly orthodox explanation (O, IV, pp. x–xiii, and Belfagor, 1980, p.
695f).33 Rome, he says, represented for Freud ‘the alma mater, the
symbol of the mother herself’; thus the Roman phobia is the fear of
32 Both Schorske and (to a lesser extent) Robert are afflicted by a ‘Winckelmannian’ enthusiasm which

leads them to disregard several facts. They might have discovered, not only in Justi’s classic biography
(see previous note), which they cite, but in any encyclopaedia, that (1) Winckelmann wanted to go to
Rome, and went there, not because he loved things Roman, but because he loved Greek art, many of
whose monuments were to be found in Rome and in Campania. His glory is that the discovery of
Greek art (which he knew, for the most part, through copies of the Roman period), and of Greek
civilization in general, owes much to the impetus he gave to classical scholarship and to German
neo-humanism; his limitation is that, since he regarded the Greek ideal of beauty as an ‘absolute’, he
had little understanding of whatever did not conform with that ideal; and (2) Rome was an especially
favourable site for the study of ancient art, but, in the eighteenth century, it was certainly not the
centre of European civilization: a far higher level had been reached in France, England, Holland and
in Germany itself. Reckless pursuit of an analogy with Freud should not lead us to make Winckelmann’s
going to Rome and his opportunistic conversion to Catholicism into the paradigm of a passage from
a backward, enclosed culture into a more advanced one.
33 Anzieu (independently, it seems, of Musatti, and more briefly than him) offers a few hints: see the

Italian ed. cited above, I, pp. 209, 234.

22
incest. Thus, at last, quod non fecit Freudus, fecit Musattus: Hannibal, the
‘compact majority’, the hatred for Rome as persecutor of the Jews,
were all masking a truth which motives of discretion disinclined Freud
to confess.

Many of my reasons for regarding this explanation as absurd have

already been given in the course of my argument, and others will appear
in what follows. Rome was not a ‘forbidden love’, as Musatti claims; it
was hated (still more hated, as we have seen, at the level of the
unconscious!) and desired as an object of conquest, while yet being
feared because it was hated.34 I am well aware that, if one abuses the
notion of ambivalence—as Freud, himself, often did, elsewhere—
everything can be interpreted as the opposite of everything. One can
argue that an element of aggression is present in every love, and that
Freud’s desire to reach Rome, simultaneously aggressive and frustrated
as it is, therefore symbolizes a repressed desire to ‘possess’ the mother.
All such conjuring tricks, however, designed to confirm a preconceived
hypothesis, seem to me unworthy of anyone who truly wishes to explain
or to gain knowledge. Moreover, nothing that Freud ever said or wrote
allows us (if it did, Musatti would know of it) to think that Rome
figured in any way as an alma mater for him. This symbolism belongs to
the idealization of all things Roman:35 we might expect it from an
Italian nationalist, or even from a German affected by the ‘Romanism’
widespread in Germany after the First World War (see note 27 above),
but not from Freud or his circle. The fact that Freud, before he had
managed to overcome the phobia, spent a long while, in Vienna,
consulting a map of Rome (letter to Fliess, 23 October 1898), is so little
a ‘proof’ of Musatti’s thesis that Musatti himself, without commenting
on his change of opinion, provides two different explanations of it, the
one worse than the other, separated by a gap of ten years. Having once
discerned in the incident a symbolic expression of ‘the child’s sexual
curiosity and his impulse to explore his body’ (O, IV, p. xiii), he writes
in Belfagor (1980, p. 695)—probably because his previous explanation
seems to him to take too little account of incestuous desire—that Freud
pored over the map of Rome ‘as a man might gaze at the portrait, or

34 There are no grounds whatever for the distinction which Schorske wants to set up between ‘la

Rome de Freud enfant . . .—rebarbative, hostile, bureaucratique—’, and the Rome which Freud
wished to visit during the 1890s: ‘The former is an object of hatred, an enemy to be conquered, the
second is an object of desire, with which one falls in love’ (‘la première est un objet de haine, ennemi
à conquérir, la seconde est un objet de désir dont on tombe amoureux’: see Schorske, p. 318). But did
not the ‘Hannibalic’ inhibitions, even though Freud traced them to sources in his childhood and
adolescence, continue to disturb him and to block his path until 1901? And does the contrast which
he draws between himself and the ‘compact majority’ not recur, as we have seen, in writings of 1925
and 1926? See also the discussion below of Freud’s impressions when he finally managed to reach
Rome.
35 The image, the conception, is of more importance than the form of words. Since there is, however,

a link between them, it is perhaps worth observing that the expression alma mater as a designation of
Rome appears nowhere, not only in the Freudian texts, but in ancient Latin writings. Only very late,
in the Imperial period, is Rome regarded and venerated as a goddess; and when this does begin to
happen, it is only very rarely referred to by the epithet mater (or alma, without the mater), which is not
found except in authors of the latest Imperial period. An overall view of these questions is given by F.
Ritter, in Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, IV, 13off; Thesaurus
Linguae Latinae, I, 1704, 58f, and 65; VIII, 445ff. The epithet alma (and also mater) is, however, often
used in reference to Cybebe and Cybelle (the Magna Mater), to the Earth, and to Venus.

23
re-read the letters, of the woman he loves’. I believe that the explanation
is quite different: in the case of any desire to realize an ambition
(whether to complete a journey, to write a book, or whatever), the
more it is blocked or delayed by inhibitions, the more detailed the plans
and interminable the preparations to which it gives rise. When one is
failing to do something, there is no more obvious self-justification than
the plea: ‘I must prepare myself more fully.’ Those who make the most
detailed and exhaustive consultations of railway timetables, road maps
or tourist guides are those who never make up their minds to leave, or
do so only with difficulty and anxiety. Suetonius (Tib. 38) has left us an
amusing account of the Emperor Tiberius’s fear of travelling: every
year, once he had declared his intention to visit the imperial provinces,
all possible preparations were made for the journey, and prayers were
offered up to the gods for his safe conduct both by himself and by
others on his behalf; and in the end, he always remained at Rome, or
undertook only the shortest trips. Freud’s repeated consultations of the
map of Rome were a way of saying to himself: ‘I’ve not given up the
idea of going; but I shall go there only when I have equipped myself
beforehand with a knowledge of the city’s topography, so that I can go
anywhere in complete safety.’ Similarly, the surest way of not writing a
book is to continue indefinitely with the planning and amassing of
material for it (as do those authors whom we call ‘perfectionists’); and
the surest way not to make a revolution is to take the greatest pains in
preparing for it, as did the German Social Democrats before World
War I; and we could give further examples. Symptoms of anxiety, of
varying but broadly similar kinds, continued to afflict Freud for a long
time afterwards (in regard to travelling in general, not specifically to
Rome): Jones (1, pp. 335f) says that ‘he retained in later life relics of
it’—that is, of his fear of travelling—‘in being so anxious not to miss a
train that he would arrive at a station a long while—even an hour—
beforehand.’

Freud in Rome

We shall return shortly to other supposed ‘confirmations’ of the

incestuous interpretations of the ‘Roman phobia’. First, however, it
seems appropriate to take a look at Freud’s reactions when finally, in
September 1901, he managed to reach Rome. In the letter to Fliess (19
September 1901), which contains his first impressions of the city, Freud
distinguishes in his judgements between the ‘three Romes’. Contempor-
ary Rome, he finds ‘hopeful and likeable’ (we have noted that after the
founding of the Italian nation there were no further significant out-
breaks of anti-Semitism). Papal Rome, he found he could not ‘freely
enjoy’ for he remembered too bitterly how the Church had persecuted
the Jews (and this is further proof of the mistakenness of the ‘incestuous’
interpretations, which take those elements which relate to Freud’s
Jewishness to be a mere screen for the truth of the ‘Roman phobia’).
Ancient Rome, he found beautiful and was able to contemplate
‘undisturbed’. We have already had occasion to note that the opposition
Hannibal–Ancient Rome had long since been transmuted into the
opposition Hannibal–Papal Rome, and this explains why Freud’s
judgement on ancient Rome is not hostile. All the same, it is not nearly
24
as eulogistic as Jones, Robert, and above all Schorske36 would have us
believe, although it is followed, in the same letter to Fliess, by an
expression of great admiration (tempered with a measure of irony) for
the temple of Minerva, and although other letters give further evidence
of his pleasure in Roman works of art. But nothing in their tone
suggests a man who has been reunited with his alma mater.

Certainly, Freud was overjoyed to have arrived in Rome (as we learn

from the letter to Fliess just cited), even if, as he hastens to add, the
fulfilment of his long-cherished wish ‘was slightly disappointing, as all
such fulfilments are when one has waited for them too long.’ His joy,
however, sprang not from ‘love’, but from his having conquered his
phobia. He had done so, moreover (as is clear from the letters, and also
from an additional note of 1909 to the Traumdeutung, SE, IV, p. 194),
without having to overcome excessive inhibitions, and even without
any fear—a marvellously happy outcome of all his earlier anxieties.
Anyone with any knowledge of neurosis, which need not be that of the
psychiatrist but may be that of a ‘victim’, knows that agoraphobia, for
example, can be ‘overcome’ in a variety of ways. One may succeed in
crossing a public square, but only at the cost of palpitations, tremors,
disorientation, terror of being unable to ‘hold out’ to the far side;
alternatively, one may enjoy an unexpected remission of the neurosis,
and cross the square without noticing any unpleasant feelings. In the
first case, the ‘victory’ is in truth a defeat, for the price paid is too high
and will discourage further attempts: the phobia might admittedly have
led to worse things (a sense of vertigo causing its victim to collapse in
mid-course, an irresistible impulse to turn back after the first faltering
steps), but it has been exacerbated. In the second case, by contrast, we
can speak of victory properly so called, a victory which is usually
temporary but sometimes proves permanent (in which event we speak
not of a remission but of a ‘spontaneous cure’, although it frequently
happens that, when one particular phobia disappears, another takes its
place: the symptoms change, but the neurosis persists). The ending of
the ‘Roman phobia’ must have been of this type: a spontaneous cure, or
at least a spontaneous disappearance of this one symptom, since Freud
remained a neurotic all his life. Hence his joy, which immediately led
him to comment on his own success in terms which, for a psychiatrist,
seem rather casual and superficial, not to say laconic: ‘it only needs a
little courage’ (SE, IV, p. 194). Even Jones, inclined as he is to accept
without demur whatever Freud may say, adds a parenthetical note of
exclamation in reporting this remark.

Naturally, that Freud was cured of his ‘Roman phobia’ implied neither
(as we have seen) that he ceased to hate Rome for having persecuted
the Jews, nor that he ceased to admire Hannibal. It implied only the
cessation or attenuation of the neuropathological, even psychopathol-
ogical, disposition which had led Freud to an identification with
Hannibal so extreme that he had become incapable (in a wholly different
situation) of achieving what his Semitic hero of old had found
36
Art. cit. p. 327: ‘Seule la Rome de l’antiquité le plongea dans un profond enthousiasme’. See also the
distinction which we draw a little below between admiration for Rome, and joy at having arrived
there.

25
impossible, and had made contemporary Rome the concentrated symbol
of every oppression which the Jews had suffered at the hands of
Christians. Musatti and others draw attention to several circumstances
which they consider pertinent: the end of Freud’s self-analysis and his
consequent feeling of subjective freedom, the weakening and final
break-up of his friendship with Fliess (like many of Freud’s dealings
with other people, this was an unpleasant episode, but Freud, we must
note, experienced it as a relief), and above all his decision to relax his
own strict principles a little, not indeed by converting to Christianity,
but by allowing his allies to ‘intrigue’ a little on his behalf in connection
with the university professorship he was seeking.37 All these circum-
stances can be considered as in part auxiliary causes of the overcoming
of the ‘Roman phobia’, and in part consequences of its being overcome,
which then further strengthened his sense of security. There was also a
‘Jewish’ motive which heightened Freud’s pleasure at being in Rome,
both during this first trip and still more so during the following journey
of September 1912. This was his interest in the Moses of Michelangelo,
which reawakened in acute, pathological form his identification with
Moses: for pathological one must call it, in view of Freud’s daily trips,
during his 1912 visit, to Michelangelo’s statue, on which he gazed in
order to ‘decipher its secret’ (see his letter to Marthe of 25 September
1912). Thus in place of the ‘Roman phobia’ was substituted another, it
too consisting in an identification with a ‘great Semitic leader’ who,
according to Freud’s interpretation, had suffered a severe setback (the
insubordination of his people) and had barely managed to restrain
himself.

The Sexual Interpretation and the ‘Athenian Phobia’

Various analogies have been invoked in support of the incestuous

interpretation of the ‘Roman phobia’; none of them, however, is to my
mind consistent with it.

First Jones (II, p. 21, although, as we have noted, he refrains from any
explicit statement of its incestuous nature), and later Robert and
Musatti, draw attention to two notes added in 1911 and 1914 to a
passage of the Traumdeutung (SE, V, p. 398). Discussing incestuous
dreams, Freud here draws upon an article of 1910 by Otto Rank and
mentions three tales, deriving from ancient sources, of incestuous
dreams relating to Caesar, to Brutus and the Tarquinii, and to Hippias,
the exiled Athenian tyrant. The first and the third were supposed to
have dreamt of lying with their mothers, dreams interpreted as
foretelling future dominion (in Caesar’s case, over the whole world,
that is, over the earth, mother of us all; in Hippias’s, over his Athenian
homeland, to which he would make a victorious return). The Tarquinii
37 It is Schorske’s one merit that he insists on the importance of this more relaxed attitude which Freud
took towards himself. However, he is quite wrong (and his tone, moreover, is a little irritating: Freud,
he implies, at last gave up his hermit-like ways, and learned to live in the world!) to exaggerate this
factor in Freud’s cure, to the point where he makes it the sole cause. We are supposed to see the Freud
of the period after 1901 as nothing but a man of science, indifferent to the Jewish question, to the
‘political’ organization of the psychoanalytic movement, and to all other such matters. Such a
perspective makes it more than ever impossible to understand Freud’s last years, from Totem and Taboo
to Moses and Monotheism.

26
were said to have received from the Delphic oracle a prophecy that
whichever of them first embraced his mother would become ruler of
Rome, but Brutus supposedly forestalled them by immediately kissing
the earth, symbol of motherhood. Other analogous dreams are attested
to by classical authors, and Artemidorus, in his still extant work on The
Interpretation of Dreams, which dates from the second century BC, devotes
a chapter (1 p. 79) to dreams of mother-incest, classifying them
according to a complex casuistry, and considering some to be of good
and others of evil omen; and he too remarks on the symbolic equivalence
mother⫽earth and mother⫽homeland.38 However, and apart from the
fact that Freud makes no connection between these dreams and his
‘Roman phobia’—a silence which one might attribute to his censor-
ship—the dreams related here lack the element of inhibition, and thus
of phobia: the incest dream is taken without more ado to betoken good
fortune (Hippias and Brutus interpreting their own dreams, without
recourse to soothsayers), and is seen as an encouragement to seek
dominion over the homeland; and no neurotic fear of incest obstructs
the achievement of that goal.39 The situation, therefore, is completely
different, and Freud’s own comment is made in seeming unawareness of
the neurotic problems induced by love of the mother (‘I have found
that people who know that they are preferred or favoured by their
mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an
unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring
actual success to their possessors’).40 As if this were not enough, the
scholars whom we have cited have forgotten, once again, that for Freud
Rome was neither a homeland nor a venerated ‘mother Earth’, but a
hostile and menacing city.

Musatti maintains that the sexual interpretation of the ‘Roman phobia’

can find support in a sort of ‘Athenian phobia’ (the expression is my
own) which Freud experienced some years later, in 1904, and of which
he speaks in a very beautiful piece of writing dating to 1936, A
Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis (SE, XXII, pp. 239–48). Freud, who
was accompanied by his younger brother Alexander, no sooner arrived
on the Acropolis than he had a feeling of dual personality. One part of
his Ego was saying to itself: ‘What I see is not real’—the Acropolis
does not exist, and I am not standing on the Acropolis. The other part
was ‘justifiably astonished’ at such incredulity, and indeed had the
opposite feeling, a sense of déjà vu at being in a place already familiar (p.
241).
38 Cf. Artemidorus, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica), trans. with commentary by Robert J.

White, Park Ridge, Noye Press, 1975, p. 61f and p. 81, n. 97. See also the Introduction to Artemidorus,
Il libro dei sogni, Milan 1975, pp. xii ff.
39 There is no doubt that the ancient Greeks mostly regarded incest as a great impiety; however, there

is evidence that this prohibition was sometimes challenged, and that a less severe attitude was
sometimes taken towards it. This is denied by Eric R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley
1951, Chs. II and VI), but some of the passages which he cites contradict his own thesis.
40 It should not be overlooked that the Freud who added these notes was in many respects a different

man from the author of the first edition of the Traumdeutung. He had come to give ever greater
credence to the symbolic value of myths and even to the veracity of prophecies, auguries and so on.
His rationalism was continually yielding fresh ground to irrational impulses. What is more, he forgot,
when he attributed ‘a true psychological insight’ to these ancient interpretations of prophetic dreams,
that Hippias never actually succeeded in returning to his homeland, as his dream of incest had promised
him he would: the Persians were defeated, and Hippias did not return to rule over Athens!

27
Here, too, Freud refers to childhood memories, although once again
they are not sexual, and do not go back to his earliest years. While a
schoolboy, he had obviously never had any doubts about the existence
of the Athenian Acropolis; but he had despaired of ever visiting it. This
lack of confidence persisted even as he was travelling to Athens,
becoming especially strong after they had passed Trieste: Freud and his
brother had convinced themselves that some combination of obstacles
would prevent their reaching Athens—not for any particular rational
reason, but because of some unconscious sense that actually to see the
Acropolis would be ‘too good’, an unmerited reward. And when they
did arrive, his ‘feeling of estrangement’ (Entfremdungsgefühl, in Freud’s
text; Strachey’s rendering, ‘derealization’, conforms with a term used
by other psychiatrists)41 in the face of what he was seeing amounted, as
Freud lucidly explains, to one more semi-conscious way of saying to
himself: ‘too good to be true’ (p. 242: the phrase is in English even in
the German text). Too beautiful, insofar as it was too undeserved: joy
was tempered by remorse at the thought that the father of Sigmund and
Alexander had never been able to allow himself such pleasures, and that
in outdoing him his sons were acting ‘illicitly’ from the standpoint of
traditional moral principles.42
What do Freud’s paranormal sensations in Athens have in common
with the phobia which, until a few years earlier, had prevented his
visiting Rome? What allows us to affirm with such enviable certitude
that Athens featured along with Rome as an ‘ancient mother’ for Freud
(Musatti, O, IV, p. xiii), and that the two cities were for him ‘united and
identified . . . as symbols of the beloved, forbidden mother’ (Belfagor,
1980, p. 696)? In my view, nothing. If we look back to his then long
distant childhood, as Freud did on both occasions, we discover hatred
of Rome and love of Athens: we have already warned against the error
of confounding Freud’s feelings towards Athens and Rome (which
were also the feelings of many of his contemporaries and predecessors,
both Jewish and non-Jewish) in a single sentiment of ‘love for classical
antiquity’. In particular, Athens never figured as a symbolic city of
anti-Semitism (whereas Rome, for good historical reasons, did); nor
does Freud mention any such symbolism. The desire to see Athens had
been quite free all along of that longing for revenge and conquest
which—unconsciously, and also to some extent consciously—provoked
the wish to visit Rome.
In fact, Musatti is able to establish the link, or rather the direct identity,
which he posits between the two desires only by means of distortions
which strike me as unfortunate and illegitimate, even though he
contrives them with his customary finesse. Above all, he has to present
the experience on the Acropolis, and Freud’s whole feeling about
Athens, as being far stronger and more painful than they appear in
41
On the precise meaning of Entfremdungsgefühl (a term which is unusual in psychiatric language, and
rare in Freud himself), see Giampaolo Lai, Due errori di Freud, Turin 1979, pp. 28, 132f. (This work
was brought to my attention by Salvatore Barone.) Lai proposes the literal translation ‘sentimento di
estraniazione’ (‘feeling of estrangement’). Overall, however, Lai’s book is forced and misleading.
42
Such expressions of an altogether pre-bourgeois morality (nobody should aspire to ‘rise’ above the
economic and social station in which they are born) are characteristic of Freud, and their implications
suggest an oedipal interpretation.

28
Freud’s own account. Certainly, the sensation Freud describes (‘too
good to be true’) is mildly psychopathological, and is connected with a
tendency to wish away, not (as would be normal in terms of Freudian
theory) that which is distressing or shameful, but that which seems too
pleasant and therefore arouses remorse and unease. Freud himself
emphasizes that this feeling of being ‘wrecked by success’ is exceptional,
but not unique (p. 242); other examples of it are indeed given in his
earlier writings. All the same, if we read his account without preconcep-
tions it is clear that Freud stresses, not the disagreeable aspect of his
experience, but what we might call, etymologically, its ecstatic quality;
and this ecstatic state is predominantly one of joy mingled with
astonishment. To the incredulity which we have already mentioned was
opposed, Freud says, ‘some expression of delight or admiration’ (p.
241). To speak, as does Musatti, of ‘acute anguish’ is therefore mistaken;
and only this mistake allows him to claim that ‘not just Rome, but
Athens, too, with its Acropolis, disturbed him’. Freud’s sense of
remorse at having ‘gone further than his father’, to which he refers, can
admittedly be related broadly to the Oedipus complex; but it has
nothing whatever to do with an incestuous longing for Rome as
mother-symbol, and to argue that it has is to embark on the merest
sophistry. It is Musatti who suggests the link. At first, it is purely
hypothetical: ‘Social rivalry can well act as a cover for sexual rivalry’
(O, IV, p. xiii). Now, cases like this invite a psychoanalyst to transform
possibilities (possibilities without foundation) into absolute certainties:
‘Again, there is a feeling of dismay at having attained to the mother: of
all beings, the most beloved and the least accessible’ (Belfagor 1980, p.
696). In the present case, it is particularly rash to make the transposition
from the social (a father who is not well off; sons who have risen in the
world, socially and economically, but who feel a certain remorse because
they have contravened the traditional injunction ‘not to rise above one’s
station’) to the sexual (father and sons competing for possession of the
mother)—but if we do make it, then hey presto! a thought inspired by
the blend of commiseration and shame with which Freud characteristi-
cally regarded his father, who had remained a poor humiliated Jew,
becomes laden with an incestuous significance for which we have no
warrant.43

Musatti has nonetheless discovered a further Roman–Athenian connec-

tion: the text in which Freud tells of his experience on the Acropolis
formed part of a volume offered by various friends and admirers to
Romain Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Romain,
and thus Roma: so Freud dedicated the essay to Rolland, connecting it
unconsciously, for all its Athenian subject-matter, with his other
43 We must be grateful to Musatti for the honesty and the intellectual clarity which allow him always

to recognize psychoanalysis and Marxism as two great terrains of knowledge, each distinct from the
other, and to resist attempts to compound the two. In my view, however, he fails to realize that if we
refer all psychic phenomena (or at least, all their most important and determinant aspects from the
point of view of the future adult) back to infantile sexuality and to the Oedipus complex, then the
whole of Marxism—and of any other liberating political-social theory—must be regarded as an error.
If indeed we accept such a point of view, then whenever in the course of our lives we clash with some
authoritarian person (schoolmaster, policeman, factory foreman, oppressive bureaucrat, or even fascist
tyrant), that person is to be seen as a ‘father figure’; nor does any space remain for political and social
conflicts ‘autonomous’ of the Oedipus complex.

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supposed mother-city, Rome. Now, I do not dispute the existence of
psychopathological manifestations based on ‘associations of meaning’;
but if I were to set about explaining, as I have done in an earlier work,
why I think it illicit and scientifically mistaken to make appeal, without
specifying any controls, to explanations of this kind, which can be
extended almost infinitely at will, then I would lose sight of my present
theme. Nor would there be much point in reminding Freudians that,
according to Freudian orthodoxy (itself, admittedly, often violated by
Freud), all these interpretations based upon associations, and upon
associations already so fluid in themselves, become still less coherent
when they rely upon ‘analysis at a distance’ (see note 29, above). At all
events, I would repeat my view that, in this case, no problem of
interpretation presents itself, since Freud’s feelings on the Acropolis
had nothing to do with his phobia about going to Rome.
Bourgeois Acceptance of Yesterday’s Outcasts

All these ‘more Freudian than Freud’ interpretations have, in my

opinion, their own unhappy significance, which matters to me still more
than the particular question of whether Freud was right in his
explanation of the ‘Roman phobia’. In this case (and, as is well known,
there are many others, even if not as many as there should have been),
Freud did not follow his own doctrine slavishly: he did not explain his
phobia by the Oedipus complex. He asserted himself as a member of a
persecuted minority, descended from a persecuted people, who had
refused to yield to conformity and who had paid the price of this proud
isolation in the form of a neurosis which he found difficult to overcome.
Along come the Freudians, demanding—with the mentality typical of
epigones—a more orthodox explanation; finding none in Freud, they
invent a couple of their own, one more orthodox (and ridiculous) than
the other. They believe themselves free of the false shame which moved
Freud to censor his own account, they feel that they are audacious,
while in fact they are far more conformist than he was, for they have
reduced the specificity of a social or ethnic-social conflict to the
generality of an explanation bonne à tout faire—which is hardly an affront
to bourgeois sensibilities today.
This rejection of Freud’s explanation of the ‘Roman phobia’ may also
be attributed to a profound change of attitude towards both psychoan-
alysis and the Jewish question on the part of western culture, which has
not been entirely grasped (it seems to me) even by people of Jewish or
partly Jewish origin, like Musatti, whose democratic and socialist spirit
is beyond question. To accept psychoanalysis or to be a Jew is no
longer to be marked out as a lonely and courageous non-conformist,
struggling with the notorious ‘compact majority’ (even if right from
the start the struggle was within the bourgeoisie, and aimed, not to
overthrow that class, but to be accepted into it on equal terms). There
are certainly still upsurges of Nazi and clerical anti-Semitism, attacks
‘from the right’ upon the ‘immorality’ of psychoanalysis still occur, and
we shall always need to be on guard against any growth of these
tendencies. Overall, however, psychoanalysis has been integrated within
conformist bourgeois culture, where it has become a more sophisticated
substitute for the old traditional religions. Today, the lonely non-
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conformists are often those who are prepared (without dismissing it out
of hand) to submit it to critical discussion. Furthermore, there now
exists a Jewish ‘compact majority’, the State of Israel, which not only
claims (with absolute justice) its own right to exist, but denies that right
to another people whose claim is equally just, submitting that people to
a murderous abuse of power worthy of the European colonialism which
helped to establish it. This State (naturally I mean not its entire
population, which includes many who are themselves oppressed and
who have shown their dissent, but the ruling political group and its
fanatical supporters) would not be able to pursue its evil policies
without the backing of a much larger ‘compact majority’—the Western
world, the so-called democratic world. Today the very term ‘anti-
Semitic’ has lost all meaning, since the most immediate victims of Israeli
arrogance are of Semitic descent, while the Israelis are sustained in their
crimes, financed, and supplied with arms by devout Christians. Among
the Jews of the Diaspora there are many (and they include some of my
dearest friends) who disown any responsibility for the policies of Tel
Aviv and keep alive the best traditions of cosmopolitan Jewry in their
enlightened defence of tolerance and non-conformity. But they are still
too few in number: the majority identify with Israel, are indirect
accomplices in its crimes, and do not realize that they risk awakening a
new anti-Jewish sentiment. For such people, to be anti-racist is not to
insist on the equality of all races and all peoples, but to gain acceptance
as members of the ‘white’, ‘civilized’ race, whose civility is to be seen in
its ever greater oppression of the underdeveloped world. Here, then, is
another reason for offering an alternative interpretation of Freud’s
‘Roman phobia’: it arose in an altogether different situation and was
based on altogether different premises. Today Hannibal, the isolated
Semitic hero, can be identified with not by an Israeli, or by a Jewish
supporter of or apologist for Israeli crimes, but by a Palestinian
defending the claims of the Palestinian people.

Translated by Kate Soper and M. H. Ryle

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