Significant Moments: Part 5

. . . got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
. . . had envisioned a literary undertaking in which a person experiences the great epochs of human history in several reincarnations, a type of biography that could be both individual and archetypal.
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art.
To a man in such a mood . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . reincarnation could be a means whereby he might also give apt expression to the stable in life's flux: to the continuity of tradition and particularly of man's spiritual and intellectual life.
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art.
It is clear what task I first dared to touch with this book?
Friedrich Nietzsche, An Attempt at Self-Criticism.
In a word, . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . my project . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . would consist of . . .
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery.
. . . a number of parallel lives, ranging through time, presumably, from the prehistoric past to the remote future.
Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
How wonderful and new and at the same time how frightful and ironic I feel, directed toward the whole of existence with my knowledge! I have discovered for myself that in me ancient humanity and the animal world, even the entire primeval age and past of all sentient being continues to invent, love, hate, conclude—
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
Such a consciousness would see the becoming and passing away of things simultaneously with their momentary existence in the present, and not only that, it would also see what was before their becoming and will be after their passing hence.
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types.
Let us mark this well:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
Such a consciousness would . . .
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types.
. . . keep . . .
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.
. . . the vision of the moment always in touch with those that have passed and those that are to come . . .
Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist.
______________________________________________________________

But let me return to my story.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
In the foregoing, I have touched only the surface of Freud's relationship to . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . his best, . . .
Jack London, The People of the Abyss.
. . . perhaps his only, friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
We have come to that point in our study when we must focus our attention entirely upon the remarkable change of course which . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . transpired in . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . the relationship between the two men . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Letter to the Editor—International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Irrevocable events that would lead to an eventual split were about to unfold.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
[Freud] still needed Fliess as audience; to his infinite delight, Fliess continued to give him "the present of an Other," a "critic and reader" of the highest quality. He acknowledged that he could not do his work wholly without a public, but declared himself content with a public of one, content, he told Fliess, to be "writing only for you."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
A good writer, Nietzsche proposed in Human, All-Too Human, has not only his own mind but the minds of his friends as well.
Peregrine Horden, Thoughts of Freud.
Yet Freud's dependence was on the verge of fading. One benefit of his self-analysis was that it gradually uncovered the tangled roots of his trust in his "daimon" from Berlin, and thus speeded his emancipation from the Other. He continued to share his thoughts with Fliess, sent him chapters of his dream book, and took his advice on matters of style and on protecting his subjects' privacy. He even allowed Fliess to veto a "sentimental" epigraph from Goethe. His submission to Fliess's editorial judgment proved costlier than this: at his insistence, and under protest, Freud deleted an important dream from the text. "A beautiful dream and no indiscretion," Freud wrote in resignation, "do not go together." But he continued to mourn it. Yet Freud's long labor with his masterpiece was about to come to term. "The time of gestation will soon be over," he told Fliess in July 1898. . . . Fliess, the midwife of psychoanalysis, had done his duty and soon he would go.

Freud did not simply discard Fliess because he no longer needed him. As the true contours of Fliess's mind, his underlying mysticism and his obsessive commitment to numerology, dawned on Freud at last, and as Freud came to recognize Fliess's passionately held convictions to be hopelessly incompatible with his own, the friendship was doomed.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
After the 15-year correspondence [between Freud and Fliess] that saw only the Freud letters survive for publication in an edited form, the two friends broke bitterly—Fliess once asserting. . . Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
. . . so it is recounted, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Animal in the Synagogue.
. . . that Freud was plotting to murder him by pushing him off a precipice during one of their walks. No credence is given to Fliess's fear, which the few scholars who now know of the episode consider a figment of Fliess' paranoia.
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
But that was not all.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
[Fliess had originated] a theory of human bisexuality that intrigued Freud and contributed ultimately to their bitter break, ostensibly over Freud's carelessness in disclosing the theory to another author.
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
It seemed . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . to Fliess . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . a clear case of . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . Freudian . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . robbery, or to put it more politely, borrowing.
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
Under these circumstances much of the business the two friends had been doing together was beginning to come to a halt. They found it necessary to take renewed stock of the situation . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
Not that a man sees something new as the first one to do so, but that he sees something old, familiar, seen but overlooked by everyone, as though it were new, is what distinguishes true originality. The first discoverer is usually that quite commonplace and mindless fantasist—chance.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.
Freud and Fliess met for the last time at Achensee in the Alps in the summer of 1900 when . . .
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
Freud expatiated upon the history of ideas: Forgetfulness, unconscious plagiarism, even deception are inevitable, and "you cannot take out a patent on ideas."
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Did Freud plagiarize and then excuse his illicit borrowings by pleading a poor memory . . . ?
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
The robber-genius . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.
. . . some would say . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
. . . originates when anyone has from his youth naively regarded every good thing not expressly the legal property of some particular person as free for all to plunder. Now, all the good things of past ages and masters lie freely about, hedged round and guarded by the reverential awe of the few who know them: by virtue of the lack of this feeling in him, the robber-genius is able to bid these few defiance and to accumulate for himself an abundance of riches that itself evokes reverence and awe in its turn.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.
My purpose in all this is not to expose . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . Freud . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . as a plagiarist, but as a . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . a nimble synthesizer, . . .
Donna Seaman, Review of Paul Shepard, Traces of an Omnivore.
. . .a transformational magician.
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
Intellectual robbery is after all easily done, but, [Freud] protested, he had always acknowledged the work of others, never appropriated anything that belonged to anyone else.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
This reaction made Fliess furious.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
"You damned—" he spluttered, but he was so furious as to be hardly intelligible.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
You would not have expected a base betrayal from one whom you had befriended and against whom you had committed no offence.
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
Freud remonstrated:
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud.
"No one has betrayed anything . . . --"
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
"Moreover"—
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
"In a controversy," said Freud, "I would say that both sides are usually wrong."
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud.
How grateful I am to you . . .
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza quoting Marc Chagall.
. . . Freud added sarcastically, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . to learn only afterwards what I was thinking while . . .
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza quoting Marc Chagall.
. . . working at the problems of the neuroses . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . about which you gave me so interesting retrospective hints, which I was supposed to have had as introspective before.
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza quoting Marc Chagall.
Fliess broke in roughly, "There is nothing more to be said."
Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind: A Biographical Novel of Sigmund Freud.
Clearly things had come to such a pass that it was not only inevitable that the two friends should part but better that they should do so.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
It was their last "congress," the last time they saw one another. They continued to correspond for a while, ever more sparsely. Writing to Fliess in the summer of 1901, Freud once more gratefully recited his debts to him, but bluntly told him that they had drawn apart and that in personal as in professional matters "you have reached the limits of your perspicacity."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
The actual end of the friendship was particularly difficult for Freud, and later in his life he seldom spoke of Fliess at all.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Introduction to The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904.
It should be added—
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.
My last letter was returned to me, . . .
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader.
. . . unanswered!
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
. . . stamped: "Shipped out. Address unknown."
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader.
____________________________________________________________

I find it so difficult to write just now . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
William,
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
. . . . that I have put off for a long time thanking you for the moving words in your letter. By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man's death has affected me deeply.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
What can I say?
LeRoi Jones, Excerpt from In Memory of Radio.
I valued him highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic lightheartedness he had a significant effect on my life.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
But then, how should I grasp what seems to me immeasurable?
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
Apart from those virtues which are celebrated upon every tombstone, he was distinguished by a hearty sense of humour and a kindly tolerance towards his fellow-men.
Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.
By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Though, . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
. . . in candor . . .
Candide, Excerpt from “Quiet,” lyrics by Richard Wilbur.
. . . I must confess, . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
A thought went up my mind today
That I have had before, . . .
Emily Dickinson, Excerpt from J. 701.
. . . a saying of Nietzsche’s:
Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.
Not to remain stuck to a person—not even the most loved—every person is a prison . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Freud's mourning . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . in the . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . days after his father’s death . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
. . . was exceptional in its intensity. It was exceptional, too, in the way he put it to scientific use, distancing himself somewhat from his loss and at the same time gathering material for his theories.

One phenomenon he observed in himself, and named, during these sorrowful days was survivor guilt . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
—a sublimated Darwinism, if you will—
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.
. . . a reverse Darwinism that awards sadness and fear to the survivor.
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
He confirmed its existence dramatically a few years later, in 1904. Visiting Greece for the first time, he had a curious feeling of derealization.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
For a long time . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . as he wrote to Fliess, . . .
Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision.
. . . I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Was the Acropolis really as he had learned it in school? Was not his presence there too good to be true? Much later, analyzing this experience, which long puzzled him, he referred it back to a feeling of guilt: he had surpassed his father, and that was somehow forbidden. Freud found in his self-analysis that it was perilous to win one's oedipal battles as it is to lose them. The roots of his recognition went back to the days just after his father's death when he translated his feelings into theory.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
—And now I must ask the reader to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest details of my life; for a transference of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in the hidden meaning of dreams. . . .

During the summer of 1895 I had . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . a fearful dream . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . which I noted down immediately after waking.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
He dreamt he was back in his childhood in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. [He] was walking with his father past [a] tavern on the way to [a] graveyard; he was holding his father's hand and looking with dread at the tavern. A peculiar circumstance attracted his attention: there seemed to be some kind of festivity going on, there were crowds of gaily dressed townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riff-raff . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . mysterious riffraff . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . of all sorts, all singing and all more or less drunk.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Hideously masked or painted out of all semblance of humanity, they had tramped out a strange limping dance round the square; round and again, singing as they went, round and round--
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
. . . faster and faster, so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
Several voices cried out:
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
"Men to the left! Women to the right!"
Elie Wiesel, Night.
". . . clear this out now!"
Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist.
They shouted again: "Get out! . . . "
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
. . . right or left, or in any direction . . .
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
Two lines were forming.
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
An elderly woman shouted . . .
Pat McDonnell Twair, Los Angeles Sleaze Strip Czar Funds Israeli Right-Wing Extremists.
. . . something in German. I failed to understand.
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
“Rascher! Nochmals von vorn anfangen! . . . ”
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
A surge of attention, unspoken, identifiable only in a certain convergence of stillness, an inward tensing.
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father's hand: we were alone.
Elie Wiesel, Night.
"Come along, come along!" said his father.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
What was happening?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
What on earth were they doing?
Lindsey Hilsum, What on Earth Were They Doing?
Who are the people working behind the scenes?
Cheryl Walsh Bellville, Theater Magic: Behind the Scenes at a Children's Theater.
Abba, Father, . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . what are they doing?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Why won't you look at me, why won't you explain what is happening?
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
"They are drunk . . . They are brutal . . . It's not our business!" said his father.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
I went on walking. My father held onto my hand.
Behind me, an old man fell to the ground . . .
Elie Wiesel, Night.
. . . and was . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . then beaten over the head.
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
Through all my limbs a shudder ran.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excerpt from The Golden Legend.
Time was running out.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
The boy . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . put his arms round his father but he felt choked, choked.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
His father said:
Franz Kafka, The Judgment.
'Look, we have reached the boundary—we must part now; you must not accompany me any further—go back!'
Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew.
“What would happen if I followed?”
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . asked the child, looking round at the horizon that was clear.
Henry De Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon: A Romance.
There was a silence.
Don Delillo, White Noise.
At that instant his father . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . paused to look: with a sudden recollection, or by an impulse, he . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . shook his head and glanced at his son . . .
Ira Compton, Sign of Passage.
. . . with deep, tragically knowing eyes . . .
Max Schur, The Medical Case History of Sigmund Freud.
. . . and—and—
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . walked on . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson and T.C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
. . . into the distance, . . .
Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd.
. . . the far distance, . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
—and at this point . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . slowly vanished . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . a remote and isolated figure, . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
It came at last to this—
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
A minute later the square was empty, only the boy remained, . . .
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
. . . alone and forsaken in the world . . .
Dorothy T. Burlingham, The Fantasy of Having a Twin.
. . . a sole survivor and an empty shell.
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.
He tried to draw a breath, to cry out—and woke up.
He waked up, gasping for breath . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . like a man with a rope round his neck . . .
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes.
. . . and stood up in terror.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
—I have suddenly awakened in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming, in order not to perish: as a sleepwalker must go on dreaming in order not to fall.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
I felt as if I had looked into an abyss—and, as the saying goes, the abyss had looked back at me.
In the following days and weeks I often thought about the dream. I looked for gaps in its narrative patterns, loopholes in its internal logic, trying to find its code. The first thing to strike me was . . .
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts.
The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences in childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream's latent content.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
He liked to go back in his thoughts and reminiscences to his earliest days precisely because they were to him so unbelievably far away that they appeared unreal.
Tamara Deutscher, Introduction to Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
But it was necessary to get the details right.
Don Delillo, The Names.
As I close my eyes to recollect I can see . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . an image . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . rise up: where was that? Yes, I have it now:
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
I cannot remember ev'rything. I must have been . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
. . . ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
I remember only . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
. . . that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born into happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . and all of a sudden . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw.
. . . knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts, 'Jew, get off the pavement!'"—
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
“What did you do?”
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
—"I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied. That did not seem heroic on the part of the big, strong man who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another, more in harmony with my sentiments--the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since then Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Was this child really myself? was the unuttered question behind this tale.
Tamara Deutscher, Introduction to Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
As a rule, of course, a scene from childhood is represented in the manifest dream-content only by an allusion, and must be disentangled from the dream by interpretation.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
That is to say, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . by a process of . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
. . . looking at . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the meaning of . . .
H.G. Wells, The Star.
. . . all the tenuous connections.
Don Delillo, The Names.
The death of his father, then, was a profound personal experience from which Freud drew universal implications; it acted like a pebble thrown into a still pond, making successive rings of unsuspected magnitude.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he’d learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Reflecting on the event in 1908, in the preface of his Interpretation of Dreams, he commented that for him the book had a powerful "subjective" meaning which he had "been able to understand only after its completion." He had come to see it as "a piece of my self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death, that is, the most significant event, the most decisive loss, of a man's life."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
According to ancient beliefs, dreams are primarily concerned with the future, but Freud understands them as expressions of past desires: the dream represents an aspect of personal history.
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
The mystery . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . of Freud’s self-analysis . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . built around this fact, I think, that . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
Dreaming and Memory
Stanley R. Palombo, Dreaming and Memory.
. . . were one. A moment of autobiography, a minimal frieze.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Following the metaphor of an imaginary journey, Freud's analyses purported to reenter the tunnel of sleep, shedding light on the shadowy realm from above. Nevertheless, like prophetic interpretations in the Bible or Talmud, the patient's associations often point toward a future.
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
The moment . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . the moment of dreaming . . .
H.H. (Saki) Munro, A Bread and Butter Miss.
. . . referred back to . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . an emotionally significant event of the past . . .
Stanley R. Palombo, Dreaming and Memory.
. . . at the same time as it pointed forward.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Freud never wrote anything of depth about anti-Semitism and the rise of Nazism, surely the most important phenomena, socially and personally, of his day.
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
In 1927, after receiving [Arnold] Zweig's Caliban, a study of anti-Semitism that Zweig dedicated to him, Freud wrote, "With regard to anti-Semitism I don't really want to search for explanations; I feel a very strong inclination to surrender to my affects in this matter and find myself confirmed in my wholly non-scientific belief that mankind on the average are a wretched lot."
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
Freud . . .
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
. . . died never knowing how his sisters would end:
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . the eldest one . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . a frail woman . . .
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
. . . must have been arrested in the street . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
She just disappeared one day . . .
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . without a trace and probably died . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . of starvation at the Theresienstadt camp, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . while the other three were murdered, probably at . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
"[My wife] Terri is Jewish, she survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and I am also Jewish, and both of us have been immersed in holocaust literature. We are puzzled why so little has been written about the holocaust in psychoanalysis."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Psychoanalytic theory teaches that silence may be an expression of unspeakable truth. In our search for buried truth, we cannot predict in advance whether we will find treasure or treachery. . . .

Psychoanalytic theory alone cannot answer all questions about the impact of war traumas on the individual. . . . From the vantage point of the centrality of the body and its interaction with the environment in the forming and shaping of mental life, however, psychoanalytic theory is an ideal locus from which to explore discrete questions about the effect of sudden experiences outside an average expectable environment in a person's mental life. Even if such experiences become well-integrated for him or her, they are so powerful that they not only affect present and future views of self and the world but they also affect the person's prior self and world views. It is as though the person rewrites his past in light of the present—the overwhelmingly traumatic experience.
Sidney H. Phillips, Trauma and War: A Fragment of an Analysis with a Vietnam Veteran.
There is night now and there will be night tomorrow and . . .
Elie Wiesel, Dawn.
. . . there was an all-too-eloquent proof that . . .
Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age.
. . . in light of the present . . .
Sidney H. Phillips, Trauma and War: A Fragment of an Analysis with a Vietnam Veteran.
. . . there will be night . . .
Elie Wiesel, Dawn.
. . . the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Of course, the past has an impact on how a person reacts to a traumatic event. But if the event in its own right was so significant that it created some new and vastly different experience in the individual, then that new experience must in part be understood from the nature of the traumatic event. The event engenders new and different consequences irrespective of the past.
Sidney H. Phillips, Trauma and War: A Fragment of an Analysis with a Vietnam Veteran.
There are mental torments so formidable that anyone who has gone through them without retaining a deep psychic scar can truly be regarded as severely pathological, even non-human. We are here face to face with almost the same folly that one encounters in Prof. Bettelheim's (1960) book on concentration camps. There is no preparation possible for psychic survival in concentration camps.
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
There are more things in the world than I could ever dream, and, until the dire event happens to you, you never believe it will happen—but then it happens.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier.
. . . fear of unknown Theresienstadt . . . on the tram to Loschwitz over the suspension bridge . . . a last day out, a last little bit of freedom before a long (how long?) imprisonment.
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945.
So ran his thoughts, while the clang of the electric tram drew nearer down the Ungererstrasse. . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
A perpetual night of confusion was descending, I thought.
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
. . . his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
The tram, in which they were the only passengers, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.
. . . passed through several steeply rising streets, in which policemen stood or patrolled at intervals; sometimes a good way off, sometimes quite near. One with a bushy mustache, his hand on the hilt of his saber, came up as of set purpose close to the not quite harmless-looking group. The two gentlemen halted, the policeman seemed to be already opening his mouth, but K. . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . Herr K. . . .
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.
. . . forcibly pulled his companions forward. He kept looking round cautiously to see if the policeman were following; as soon as he had put a corner between himself and the policeman he started to run, and the two companions, scant of breath as they were, had to run beside him.
So they came quickly out of the town . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . a dull, cloying, humdrum, wintry, ashen town . . .
Andre Aciman, In Search of Proust.
. . . which at this point merged almost without transition into the open fields. A small stone quarry, deserted and desolate, lay quite near to a still completely urban house.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
I did not think things out; but I observed everything quietly. I watched these men go to and fro, always the same faces, the same movements . . .
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
. . . every little step . . .
A Chorus Line, Excerpt from “One,” Lyrics by Edward Kleban.
. . . the same—
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
One . . .
A Chorus Line, Excerpt from “One,” Lyrics by Edward Kleban.
. . . two, three, four, . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
. . .a series of steps, . . .
L. Frank Baum, The Scarecrow of Oz.
. . . whole steps and half steps . . .
The Music Chamber—What Are Intervals?
. . . five, six, seven, eight . . .
A Chorus Line, Excerpt from “One,” Lyrics by Edward Kleban.
. . . nine and, ten and, eleven. Twelve
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
Always the same.
Mary Roberts Reinhart, Dangerous Days.
No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction . . .
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
"What is going to happen?" we all ask ourselves. "How long can we endure this burden and torment? . . ."
Franz Kafka, An Old Manuscript.
Are we not wandering lost as through an unending void? Does vacant space not breathe at us? Has it not grown colder? Is there not perpetual nightfall and more night? Must we not light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
Let us be content to say that . . .
Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music.
. . . all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . one, one, one, one.
A Chorus Line, Excerpt from “One,” Lyrics by Edward Kleban.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.
This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.
Don Delillo, The Names.
"My year in the concentration camps . . . was to teach me much; so much, that I am not at all sure I have even now exhausted what was implied in that learning experience," Bettelheim wrote in 1960, as he sought to define the role played by the experience in his life as a whole.
Nina Sutton, Bettelheim, A Life and a Legacy.
Of course one did not seek them out, but there was a way to benefit from the most awful experience.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I began writing "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" in 1940, about a year after I had been set free and moved to the United States. From the moment I arrived in this country, within weeks after liberation, I spoke of the camps to everybody willing to listen, and many more unwilling to do so. Painful as this was because of what it brought back to mind, I did it because I was so full of the experience that it would not be contained. I did it also because I was anxious to force on the awareness of as many people as possible what was going on in Nazi Germany, and out of a feeling of obligation to those who still suffered in the camps. But I met with little success. At that time, nothing was known in the U.S. about the camps, and my story was met with utter disbelief.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
National Socialist Germany seems to have been something new in human affairs. Its roots were old, and the soil was old, but it was a mutant.
Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance.
A plague!
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
The Third Reich erupted into history as a surprise. It lasted a mere dozen years. It is gone. Historians, social scientists, political analysts, still stammer and grope in the mountainous ruins of the unprecedented facts about human nature and society that it left behind. Ordinary people prefer to forget it: a nasty twelve-year episode in Europe's decline, best swept under the rug.
Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance.
Before the U.S. was drawn into the war, people did not wish to believe that Germany could do such horrendous things. I was accused of being carried away by my hatred of the Nazis, of engaging in paranoid distortions. I was warned not to spread such lies. I was taken to task for opposite reasons at the same time: that I painted the SS much too black; and that I gave them much too much credit for being intelligent enough to devise and systematically execute such a diabolic system, when everybody knew that they were but stupid madmen.

Such reactions only convinced me more of the need to make people aware of the reality of the camps, of what went on in them and the nefarious purposes they served. My hope was that publishing a paper, written as objectively as possible to forestall the accusation that I distorted facts out of personal hatred, might make people listen to what I had to tell. That was my conscious reason for writing "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," which I finished in 1942.

Unfortunately, for well over a year, this paper was rejected by one after another of the psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals to which I sent it, thinking that these were most likely to be willing to print it. The reasons for rejection varied. Some editors objected because I had not kept written records while in the camps, implicitly revealing that they had not believed a word of what I had written about conditions in the camps. Others refused it because the data were not verifiable, or because the findings could not be replicated. A few came right out and said that both what I claimed were facts and my conclusions were most improbable exaggerations. Some added--probably correctly, as judged by my experience when I tried talking about these matters to professional people—that the article would be too unacceptable to their audiences.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Certainly it was awkward that I was obliged to publish the results of my inquiries without there being any possibility of other specialists testing and checking them, particularly as those results were of a surprising and by no means gratifying character.
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.
Writing the essay was difficult intellectually, because at the time psychological thought had not yet developed the conceptual framework necessary for dealing adequately with these problems, so I was forced to struggle with it myself.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, "That's not it." So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn't it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
Elie Wiesel, A Sacred Magic Can Elevate the Secular Storyteller.
I attempted to develop concepts with which to begin to map this new territory.
Warren M. Brodey, On The Dynamics of Narcissism.
But this avail'd not:
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
. . . for . . .
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
. . .even harder was trying to deal with the anxiety-provoking and otherwise deeply upsetting. . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
. . . memories of terror . . .
Doreen Carvajal, Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn.
. . . which constantly intruded, making it arduous to think objectively about the camps. Trying to be objective became my intellectual defense against becoming overwhelmed by these perturbing feelings.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
I have never before even imagined anything like this period of intellectual paralysis. I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, curious states . . . twilight thoughts, veiled doubts . . . The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself—my . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . extreme situation.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Something from the deepest depths of my own . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . mental life . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
. . . sets itself against any advance in understanding . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . the problem of survivorship.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
I believe I am in a cocoon, and God knows what beast will crawl out.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
A strong man could perhaps survive without taint many years of solitary confinement and repeated physical torture; perhaps, when optimal psychological conditions are given, man should be capable of overcoming even the memory of the most atrocious sufferings on his own part. But once a man has been forced to witness unspeakable sufferings in others and to stand by passively, without any chance of raising a protecting or revenging hand, he has indeed lost the right to smile again, to be "normal." If he is normal, then he is sicker than the person whose sleep is beset with nightmares, or who is incapacitated for earning his livelihood. In some places, both Hamlet and Lear come close to a concentration-camp atmosphere . . .
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
Of their treatment at the hands of the Germans, the Jews could say, paraphrasing King Lear, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Germans, they kill and torture us for their sport."
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
Consciously I felt a great urge to write about the concentration camps, and in a manner which would make others think about them, make it possible for them to grasp what went on in them. It was a need which, many years later in the literature on survivors, was called their compulsion to "bear witness." My desire to make people understand received much impetus from my need to comprehend better . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
. . . in small matters and large . . .
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up In Nazi Berlin.
. . . what had happened to me while in the camps, so I could gain intellectual mastery over the experience.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
"It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. . . ."
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945.
If I can feel outrage at the injustice I have suffered, can recognize my persecution as such, and can acknowledge and hate my persecutor for what he or she has done, [then] the way to . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . will . . .
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945.
. . . be open to me.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
That truth will bring me either peace or despair, but whether the one or the other, it will be beyond doubt or question. This decision strengthens me.
Franz Kafka, The Burrow.
And indeed . . .
Arthur Miller, Conversation with John Lahr.
I have given body to their stupidities, their malice, their worthlessness, and have brought all these to life here . . .
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader.
. . . on a metaphorical stage to bear public witness.
Ronald Hingley, Pasternak: A Biography.
Time washes away the essence of events and would grant amnesty even to the most heinous crime ever committed under the stars; but I have preserved this essence. My ear has recorded the sounds of the deed, my eye the gestures of the talks, and my voice, by merely quoting, has preserved the base chord of this era forever.
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader.
He would recall exactingly. He would . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . tenaciously attempt to . . .
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven.
. . . preserve for future generations . . .
Photos: The Warsaw Ghetto, II.
. . . the memory of the past . . .
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven.
. . . in the form of . . .
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life.
. . .a telling stage-picture in which characters are suspended in significance like flies in amber, . . .
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
. . . an honest effort to make the vanished horror live for all the world that was not there.
Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance.
Everyone must find his own form of aggressiveness in order to avoid letting himself be made into an obedient puppet manipulated by others. Only if we do not allow ourselves to be reduced to the instrument of another person's will can we fulfill our personal needs and defend our legitimate rights.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
And—I would add—
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
. . . as writers we cannot avoid the effort, or the temptation, to . . .
Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.
. . . pursue the truth and make something come of it—
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Wait a minute!
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
I was just remembering . . .
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
So what's the—?
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
Oh yes! I think I read about . . .
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
Poor Bruno Bettelheim!
Nina Sutton, Bettelheim, A Life and a Legacy.
. . . [who] described his experiences in a German concentration camp of the early days.
Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle.
What did he say?
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
Wait!
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
It just crossed my mind.
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
Contrasted with . . .
Bret Harte, The Devotion of Enriquez.
. . . Freud, a miner of sorts who thrived on "vertical" excavations into the depths of an individual's inner . . .
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
. . . world, . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
­ . . . Bettelheim . . .
Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy.
. . . reports the various steps and external manifestations (such as affectations in posture and dress) by which the inmates abandoned their identity as anti-Fascists in favor of that of their tormentors.
Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle.
And somehow . . .
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
He himself preserved his life and sanity by deliberately and persistently clinging to the historical Jewish identity of invincible spiritual and intellectual superiority over a physically superior outer world: he made his tormentors the subject of a silent research project which he safely delivered to the world of free letters.
Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle.
It was that deliberate recovery of such a specific and proud . . .
Robert D. Kaplan, The Books of Daniel: Two views of the life and death of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
. . . identity . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . that kept his tormentors from reducing him to a mere symbol.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Books of Daniel: Two views of the life and death of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
But you think that's possible?
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass.
Who can say?
Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.
A writer once summed the matter up this way:
Franz Kafka, The Problem of Our Laws.
All suffering under a social order that is senseless prepares the soul for vision.
Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia.
Of course . . .
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
This cannot be gainsaid, but . . .
Franz Kafka, The Problem of Our Laws.
In any case, . . .
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.