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  • Freud, Jung, and the Taboo of Rome
  • Janice Hewlett Koelb

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past.

Freud Civilization and its Discontents

By inventing the barbarian as the antitype of the civilized Greek, the Greeks nurtured the fear that barbarians “(real, or for the most part, imaginary) would sooner or later triumph” (Beard 1997.10). Roman intellectuals such as Tacitus, who nominated the German tribes as salutary models for decadent first-century Rome, took the Greek projection of barbarity one giant psychological step further. These intellectuals began to speculate on the inner corruption of their own culture “and to play with the awful paradox that real barbarity lay in their own midst, while the savages at their margins were the true inheritors of civilized classical values” (Beard 1997.10). In so doing, these Romans began to construct a figure of Rome herself as an awful paradox that two thousand years later has not lost its potency as an emblem for themes of cultural and personal integration and disintegration, renascence and ruin.

This paradoxical figure informs one of the strangest coincidences in the afterlife of antiquity: a phobia of Rome that afflicted and inspired both Freud and Jung, and that had absolutely nothing to do with ever having been there. Many Romes informed the phobia, all of them historical conceptions or imaginative ideas: Rome as civilization, the new city after the destruction of Troy; Rome as the enemy of Carthage; Rome as multicultural empire; Rome as universal world church and seat of anti-Semitism; Rome as home and goal, a place of right relationships, right perspectives, meanings, and orientation; and Rome as the golden-age archaeological [End Page 391] site it already was when Evander gave wandering Aeneas a guided tour of the ruined abode of Cacus and the remains of the ancient Janiculum and Saturnia (Aeneid 8.184–369).

The fear and desire at the core of each man’s phobia was also for each a creative nexus, a source of emotionally evocative images and ideas that informed the urgent questions at the heart of their common intellectual enterprise: what are the relationships among memory, dream, psychopathology, and the distant human past? Their experience of a seemingly atavistic phenomenon, place-taboo, is an authentic object lesson in the shared fundamental tenet of their theories (however much those theories came to vary in other respects): the ancient human psyche is continuous with the modern. Jung never could (or would) violate the Rome taboo. Instead, he respected the restriction as something like an apotropaic charm; it functioned as a sacrifice preventing engulfment by the visionary experiences he openly embraced. Unlike Jung, Freud violated the taboo and all it meant to him, but his procedure, no less magical than Jung’s, was to atone for the violation by ceremonials of expiation and propitiation. Thus he kept in check the anxiety associated with Rome.

Freud loved Rome from afar. He knew the centuries-old palindrome ROMA/AMOR and yearned for the place as ardently as Venus’s legendary son Aeneas; he also longed to destroy it as passionately as Hannibal. The ambivalence is well known and well documented in Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess. On November 5, 1897, for example, after telling Fliess how much he had enjoyed the annual visit of Emanuel Loewy, “professor of archaeology in Rome” who “usually keeps me up until three in the morning,” he broke off the last sentence with a wistful ellipsis: “Of his Rome …” (Masson 1985.277–78).1 As early as December 3, 1897, he confessed to Fliess that his “longing for Rome” was “deeply neurotic” and “connected to … hero-worship of the Semitic Hannibal” (Masson 1985.285). “Hannibal is explicitly marked as a figure for the Jew (Semitic) … and his desire (like Freud’s) is to possess—and perhaps destroy—Rome, the gentile” (Boyarin 1997.266).2 The next October, when Freud’s writing had [End Page 392] stalled, he linked the “dream,” his private shorthand for The Interpretation of Dreams (1958 [1900]), to that other dream, the desire for Rome: “I am...

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