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boundary 2 27.1 (2000) 175-179



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Not “Too Good to Be True”:
A Late Freudian Phantasy of Self-Education

Daniel T. O’Hara

“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is the title of a letter Freud sends to Romain Rolland on the occasion of the author’s seventieth birthday, 29 January 1936.1 Freud knows Rolland principally through their correspondence and his literary work, having met him only once, in 1924. Freud alludes to Rolland several times in his own works, most memorably by name at the opening of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

There, you will recall, Freud confesses to the absence of the oceanic feeling. This is the feeling of oneness with the cosmos, which, Rolland had speculated in a letter to Freud, may be at the origin of religious belief. Freud prefers his own less specialized, more commonplace theory: that infantile helplessness and subsequent longing for the father’s protection against [End Page 175] feelings of powerlessness are the realistic and emotional sources for the psychology of faith.

In “A Disturbance of Memory,” the issue does not seem to be such intellectual disputes. Rather, Freud’s letter itself is the issue, because it is an elaborately self-regarding, and so puzzlingly, narcissistic birthday message. To put it bluntly, to whom, or to what, is Freud’s communication at this time in homage?

To be sure, Freud begins his letter with a warning to Rolland that it is “the gift of an impoverished creature” (239). The eighty-year-old Freud means that, despite his best intentions, and lacking the creative power of his younger days, he can now produce little, even when pressed by circumstances, that is not evidently about himself. His naked self-regard is his sole majesty. Nonetheless, Freud intends this honesty about his excessive self-concern to mirror in a small way the love of and devotion to the truth, and to speaking one’s mind, that Rolland, despite the then current European situation due to the Nazis, still practices.

Even if we do appreciate this warning, because twelve of the letter’s remaining thirteen paragraphs are taken up with a renewal of Freud’s own self-analysis, the letter gives us pause. For all the details of this self-analysis make Freud’s conclusion, where he finally recalls Rolland as his auditor, a surprise. It jolts the reader into wonder at the bad taste of singing not the praises of the birthday boy but the anxious obsessions of oneself. Why does Freud do this? By analyzing Freud’s specific performance in the letter, I hope to answer this question and to indicate how we should read his textual performances more generally.

The substance of Freud’s self-analysis in this case concerns a curious incident that occurs in 1904 when he and his younger brother, Alexander, go on holiday. Every year, Freud and his brother take a couple of weeks in late August or early September to visit Italy, or some other southern Mediterranean country, for a vacation by the sea. In 1904, because of business dealings, Freud’s brother can spare only one week. So the Freud boys decide to visit Corfu via Trieste. While in Trieste, they have a meeting with one of Alexander’s older business associates. He advises them against Corfu—because of the late summer heat—and instead proposes, as cooler and more convenient, a trip to Athens.

Although they are convinced that this alternative will not work out, due to the suddenness and presumed red tape—surely they will need passports to go to Greece—the Freud boys act, nevertheless, as if they do believe they can and will arrive in Athens, even as they feel irritable and [End Page 176] depressed, wandering the streets of Trieste, restlessly, in preparation for their trip.

When, the next day, Freud finds himself on the Acropolis, he experiences an uncanny sensation. He feels as if he were saying to himself, “So all of this does exist just as I was told when a boy...

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