52
PARTISAN REVIEW
and thus rendered romanticism scientific. The American psychoan–
alyst Darius amston approached romanticism from
his
perspective
by arguing that his English translators and followers underestimated
the influence of romantic medicine on Freud - a point the French
have been making for some time.
Another Frenchman, Bernard Sigg, associated to the context of
the two postcards Freud sent to his wife Martha from Rome in
August 1901-to what he notes about Michelangelo's
Moses
and
what he omits, such as the figure of Julius II . By connecting this
omission to Jones's
misunderstanding
of Freud's revelation when he
first saw the
Moses,
and to Lacan's "famous
lapsus
of the
nom-du-pere, "
to the dead father, the death of his younger brother Julius, and to
Freud's concept of the death instinct, he implicitly elevated theories
on the language of psychoanalysis over those emanating from
clinical experience .
Sigg's compatriot, Renato Mezan, took off from yet another of
Freud's words, "philistine" (in his letter to Wilhelm Fliess of
September 9, 1897). Why did Freud not only employ this word in its
customary sense but also yet add a reference to the biblical Philistines?
Because we are faced with "an as yet unrecognized
lapsus
by Freud."
Going back to the Bible, to the effect of the Philistines' invasion in
the ninth century B.C . on the Israeli tribe, Mezan then elaborated
on Freud's familiarity with the entire Phillipsohn Bible his father had
given him for his seventeenth birthday.
In
it, argues Mezan rather
convincingly, he found the themes of incest, of fllial aggressivity, in–
fantile hate of the father, and tenderness towards heroes. He got
more out of this Bible than anyone else, I must add.
On balance , the Anglo-Saxons' historical investigations focused
on interpreting Freud's concepts more directly and theoretically. For
instance, Jacques Szaluta, a historian from New York, postulated
that biblical figures provided Freud with a number of ego ideals–
although he also had political , literary, philosophical, and medical
ones. And Harold Blum, to "balance" the emphasis (mostly emanat–
ing from France) on the influence of Jakob Freud on his son Sig–
mund, focused on the fact that Freud became the father of six
children during the period of his self-analysis between October 1887
and December 1895, and that there are explicit references in the
Fliess letters to indicate that "Martha's pregnancies reactivated
primal-scene trauma and unconscious fantasies of incest, castration,
abortion, and infanticide." Moreover, Blum maintains that Freud's
