Freud on the Acropolis

Reflections On A Paradoxical Response To The Real

Susan Sugarman

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429723902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

In this book, the author tracks the canonical instances of the generalized version of Sigmund Freud's example: a visit to the Acropolis when one cares about the visit, whether or not with the degree of interest and enthusiasm that Freud had.

Chapter One
The Problem

In 1904, Freud, then 48, joined his younger brother for a holiday trip to Corfu. Stopping in Trieste on the way, they visited an acquaintance who advised that they would find Corfu too hot and suggested that they go to Athens instead. A boat was sailing for Athens later that day, and it could bring them back in 3 days' time. In an age more immersed in classical civilization than ours is, the prospects of such a trip can only have attracted the brothers. The trip must have tempted Freud in particular, who both pursued antiquities as a hobby and incorporated classical themes and metaphors—the "Oedipal" complex, for example—in his work. Nonetheless, the brothers found themselves dispirited about the plan. In the hours before the ticket office opened, they thought only of the impracticality of the trip and the obstacles that would prevent it. When the ticket office opened, however, they proceeded without ado to book the trip as though they had never questioned it and duly set sail for Athens.

On the afternoon of their arrival in the city, Freud ascended the Acropolis and gazed upon its sights. A surprising thought, as he calls it, suddenly occurred to him: "So all this really does exist, just as we learned at school!"¹ (Original German: Also existiert das alles wirklich so wie wir es auf der Schule gelernt haben?!²).

On the one hand, he was to remark later, he seemed astonished to discover confirmation of a previously doubtful reality. He had responded, he thought, as someone might who had just seen the Loch Ness monster creeping along the shore of the lake: "So the sea-serpent really does exist that we've never believed in!"³ On the other hand, that the real existence of the Acropolis had ever been in doubt was itself a surprise. Freud hadn't ever doubted that the Acropolis exists.

Puzzled over the years by this paradoxical thought, Freud attempted to analyze it some 32 years later in 1936, when he was 80. He presented the analysis, a brief occasional piece entitled "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,"⁴ in an open letter to his friend, the French novelist Romain Rolland. Freud felt guilty, according to the analysis, for being in Athens. His family had been poor, and his parents uneducated. They would have lacked both the interest in embarking upon such a journey and the means for undertaking it. We all feel guilty, according to Freud, when we surpass our parents; he felt guilty for surpassing his. As a result of his guilt on this occasion, he suggests, he attempted to deny that he had arrived on the Acropolis, by imagining that the Acropolis was not there but displacing this impression into the past. He refuted this impression based upon the evidence before him: The Acropolis surely does exist.

Freud's analysis aside, many people experience the kind of paradoxical surprise that he describes when they encounter for the first time objects, places, or events that they have known about but not seen. "Not just a piece of literary self-indulgence after all," remarks a character in Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, when he sees the Sphinx.⁵ On a more mundane level, imagine that you have read in your local newspaper of a lamppost that was toppled by a recent storm. Passing by the downed pole while on other errands, you might find yourself musing something along the lines of "So it really did come down ... ."

One may experience this kind of surprise also when one encounters fresh evidence of the object as opposed to the object in itself. Shortly before my husband and I departed for a hiking holiday in a mountainous region of which we had recently learned, friends showed us pictures of the district that they had taken on a trip there 10 years earlier. Observing the close similarity between these pictures and the ones that I had seen in the guidebook that inspired our trip, I found myself thinking, "It's real."

The surprise that people express in these cases is no less paradoxical than it was in Freud's case. Lively's character knew full well that the Sphinx exists and had suggested going to see it. You, on your imaginary errand, harbored no doubts about the accuracy of the news report of the lamppost. My husband and I had bought our plane tickets, booked our lodgings, and mapped out likely hiking trails for our trip. Yet upon seeing the Sphinx, Lively's character responded as though he had doubted its existence. You behaved as though you questioned the authenticity of the report of the lamppost. I responded as though I was learning for the first time that our vacation spot was real.

I shall label as "Freud's thought," or "the thought," experiences of this kind, in which in the face of supposedly relevant evidence people profess surprise at the existence of an object of whose existence they were certain. Unless I indicate otherwise, I shall mean by these terms the general experience, as opposed to Freud's own specific one.

Why would ordinary people, fully accepting of the existence of an object, experience surprise at that object's existence when they saw either the object itself or further evidence of it? The circumstance might remind one of other "tricks" that our minds can play. Sometimes people falsely remember events that they never actually experienced or facts that they never actually heard or read.⁶ Also, people experience déjà vu, the sense that they have encountered a setting or an object before when they know that they could not have done so.⁷

These apparent misfirings of the mind invite interest because they involve more than mere uncertainty. In a case of false memory, for example, rather than simply wonder whether we put grandmother's watch in the safe as we intended to do, we actually remember having put it there— when we did not do so. In a case of déjà vu, we do not merely reflect that a scene that we have never observed is familiar in some way. We feel that we have been there, and yet acknowledge at the same time that we could never have seen it.

But "Freud's thought" is the opposite of these other experiences. In a case of false memory, people recall something that never occurred. People who have Freud's thought behave as if something that they did correctly recall as real were illusory. In a case of déjà vu, one experiences as familiar an object or event that one never experienced. People who have Freud's thought find the familiar strange.

Although the sources or raise memory and déjà vu remain controversial, one can envision ways to explain them. Someone's false memory might have been motivated by wishful thinking, for example, or facilitated by the availability of competing cues from other memories.⁸ In a case of déjà vu, people's false impression of familiarity of a situation derives from memories of some kind—of past perceptions, emotions, fantasies, and the like—only not of the situation in question.⁹ Why people should find themselves surprised to encounter the fully expected, as they do when they have Freud's thought, is less clear.

It stands to reason, therefore, that Freud should have seen fit to classify his own experience of the thought as a momentary quasipathology: an irrational structure that he generated in his own defense (against his guilt for being in Athens). The thought could be seen to parallel a family of pathological disturbances in people's perception of reality that center about the disturbance known as depersonalization disorder,¹⁰ in which people experience parts of themselves—their thoughts, feelings, or parts of their bodies— as strange. Closely related to depersonalization is derealization,¹¹ the sense that the external world is unreal. Freud classified his experience on the Acropolis as a case of "derealization" (see my further elaboration in Chapter 2).

One has to wonder, however, as I shall argue more fully later, whether the thought is appropriately characterized as an aberration of any of these kinds. It may align neither with relatively mild "mistakes" such as false memory or (nonpathological) déjà vu nor with outright pathological varieties of depersonalization and its associated disorders. Among other distinguishing characteristics, it resolves into an assertion: that the object in question really exists after all. None of the other conditions that I have described inherently resolves into an assertion, let alone into an assertion that rebuts the supposed mistake in question. Freud's thought asserts that the object is real and thus rebuts any notion that the object is not real.

Freud's thought, I shall suggest, is related to a different, ordinary realm of experience. Even if they do not experience the "thought," people are naturally and universally drawn to the real version of things. They gravitate to scenes of events that are reported in the media and to historical sites and relics. They like to see firsthand natural wonders such as total solar eclipses or their child's college diploma. Like Freud's thought, this fascination with the real is less straightforward than it might appear.

People enjoy seeing the real version of things even when they know that the events that occurred indeed occurred and have no question but that the object or the site exists. They want to see the real thing even when they could see pictures and in some cases full-scale replicas of the object or site in question. "I've heard enough about it, and I've seen enough pictures of it, but I hadn't seen it in person," commented one of the hundreds of spectators who in 1995 converged upon the site of the federal building in Oklahoma City in the wake of the unthinkable bombing that occurred there.¹²

People clamor, moreover, to see not only sites and relics of real events that occurred but settings of utter fictions. Japanese tourists fly thousands of miles, and at considerable expense, to Prince Edward Island, Canada, to visit the setting of Lucy Maude Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, which has attracted a following in Japan.¹³

As was the case with Freud, the visitors to these different sites are not (or in the case of Oklahoma City, were not) resolving any doubts about the reality of the objects and events in question. Traveling from hundreds of miles away, cameras and children in hand, the visitors to Oklahoma City cannot have doubted where they were going. The "Anne" enthusiasts do not expect their beloved characters to appear.

People who find themselves moved by these contacts also are not necessarily responding to any perceptual differences that they may detect between the thing in itself and their previous images of it. When a statue at the French Embassy in New York was determined almost certainly to be an authentic Michelangelo, people gazed with awe and disbelief at the very same object that they had observed with less passion previously.¹⁴ Insofar as people were responding to the self-same object, their awe and disbelief could not have been elicited by any change in what they were seeing.

To be sure, one's contact with the real thing can reveal details that one could perceive in no other way. In her middle adulthood, Naomi Fein, writer, legal assistant, and daughter of a schoolteacher, visited the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, in which the infamous Scopes "monkey trial" took place in 1925. John Scopes, prosecuted by William Jennings Bryan and defended by Clarence Darrow, was tried for teaching evolutionary theory in the local schools. Well versed in the case since her childhood, Fein noted, among other things, aspects of the approach to the town and of the town itself that "[n]either play nor movie" could suggest.

She also describes her "excitement that edged into anxiety" as she drove toward the area and how she suddenly felt "foolish, emotionally flat" just before she reached the courtroom itself.¹⁵ The physical detail that she noticed did not precipitate her emotional response to her visiting the site. Rather, her emotional response to visiting the site sensitized her to the physical details.

The reasons for people's fascination with the real probably vary. In some cases, for instance on a first visit to the Grand Canyon, one may indeed find oneself prepossessed by the physical display, by a grandeur and a scale that one could not have envisioned through secondhand sources, including photos and films. At least on some occasions, however, as I shall argue more fully in Chapter 9, this fascination with the real becomes obscure in the way that the paradoxical "thought" does—that all this "really does exist" when one had no doubt.

In a passing reference to his thought 10 years before he wrote his paper about it, Freud suggests that his experience may have been idiosyncratic.¹⁶ Were it not for his particular circumstances, he says, he might have ascribed his thought to the fragility of the beliefs that he had acquired as a child learning about faraway places. One might infer that this is how he would have accounted for others' experience of similar thoughts, although he does not at any point discuss others' experience.

The latter account makes the thought seem fairly straightforward. The account might be seen to suggest that one's childhood uncertainty about a place resurfaces when one finally visits the place; one then responds to this uncertainty.

Whether or not Freud either intended or would have accepted this implication in the general case, it furnishes an inadequate account of the (general) thought, as I shall show. The common, nonidiosyncratic version of this experience, despite its straightforward appearance, proves to be even more elusive than Freud's experience was to him. The problem of accounting for it cuts deep, so deep that its meaning ultimately remains somewhat elusive.

I devote this book, therefore, to the pursuit of an explanation of this thought, as a common occurrence, and to the illumination of those more general aspects of our mental life that diagnosis of the thought may reveal.

I shall be seeking what I call the psychological context of the thought. By psychological context, which I shall abbreviate as context, I mean the farnily (or families) of thoughts, feelings, or other impressions in relation to which the thought would make sense, from which it would flow naturally. When Freud sought to understand neurotic symptoms and other anomalies, including his "thought," that arise in mental life, he sought their psychological context as I have just defined it.¹⁷

Not all behavior may have a sense, or at least not a sense that is worth pursuing. One might wonder, for example, whether Freud's thought could be an accidental happening, merely a passing thought with no systematic connection to a context and no interesting meaning to recover. Arguing against this null hypothesis are the facts that the thought recurs and has a definite linguistic shape, or at least an approximate one, whether or not it is spoken aloud. The thought also occurs, as Freud's own thought did, when one is intently focused upon its object, upon which the thought reflects.¹⁸

The same arguments also undermine the related concern that the thought's context may be too obscure to retrieve. Some observers despair of detecting any coherent meaning in manifestly p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Problem
• 2 A Synopsis of Freud's Account
• 3 Freud's Thought at Face Value
• 4 Freud's Thought as a Figurative Expression
• 5 Freud's Account Analyzed
• 6 A Different Neurosis
• 7 The Thought as Mundane
• 8 The Thought as Childlike: The Reencounter with the Known in a New Guise
• 9 The Reencounter with the Known in Reality
• 10 The Adult Voice
• 11 The Paradoxical Stance
• Appendix: "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," Sigmund Freud
• Notes
• References
• Index