Luca Signorelli. Portrait of the Artist and Fra Angelico, from the Preaching and Acts of the Antichrist

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00338/1754238/octo_a_00338.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Luca Signorelli. Portrait of the artist and Fra Angelico, from The Preaching and Acts of the Antichrist. 1499–1504. On Freud’s Forgetting of “Signorelli” Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00338/1754238/octo_a_00338.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 MEYER SCHAPIRO This unpublished essay is conserved in the Schapiro Collection, Columbia University, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Schapiro worked on it from 1960 (exact date unknown) until January 30, 1990. In a supplementary note dated December 24, 1991, and placed at the end of the document, Schapiro wrote: “On re-reading text of the S. Freud–Signorelli article. It is a complete essay—text and notes—I have still to find the dates and full titles of several authors to whom I refer.” Despite this statement, the essay seems unfinished. This text should be read along with the letters 1, 3, and 29 to Damisch. Italicized notes are marginal notes written in Schapiro’s hand; all other notes are by the editors. In the first chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud introduced his theory of the role of repression in the forgetting of proper names by analyzing such an episode from his own life.1 On a ride from Ragusa to Bosnia through Dalmatia in 1898, conversing with a German fellow passenger, he asked him whether he had seen the frescoes in Orvieto by . by . Freud could not recall the great artist’s name, Signorelli, though he had a most vivid recollection of the paintings in all their details: “Not the slightest of them was effaced or unclear. I was able to visualize the pictures more vividly than I could ordinarily do; especially sharp was the artist’s self-portrait standing before my eyes.”2 Groping for the name, he thought of “Botticelli” and “Boltraffio” and rejected both as incorrect. Some days later, questioning an informed Italian person about the author of those frescoes, he recovered the name. Why, after that intense contemplation of the artist’s work and his full-length self-portrait at the side of the great frescoes, did Freud forget “Signorelli”? His 1. Throughout the essay, Schapiro quotes his own translation of Sigmund Freud, “Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens” (1904). English translation: Sigmund Freud, “The Forgetting of Proper Names,” in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960), pp. 1–7. 2. This is Schapiro’s own translation of Sigmund Freud, “Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit,” Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 4, no. 6 (1898), pp. 436–43. English translation: Sigmund Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1962, p. 291). OCTOBER 167, Winter 2019, pp. 124–129. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 126 OCTOBER explanation, which is compact and seems complete, has become an often-cited model of psychoanalytic insight. Before he turned to the subject of those Italian frescoes, Freud had been chatting with the fellow traveler about the customs of the Turks of the Bosnia-Herzegovina province through which they were riding. A doctor friend, a neurologist, who had practiced among those people had told Freud that when a patient of his died, the Turkish relatives said to him: “Herr, if he could Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00338/1754238/octo_a_00338.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 have been saved, you would have done it.”3 Freud was about to quote a second remark [by] the Turks to the doctor, this time about sexual potency: “Herr, when one loses that, life isn’t worth living”;4 but at this point, perhaps because the subject was indelicate, Freud withheld the remark and spoiled the double point of the story, its punch line. This self-restraint was induced not only by a consideration of decorum, but also—as Freud tells us—by his feelings about a patient of his own who, in despair over sexual difficulties, killed himself. Freud had learned of the suicide two weeks before, when he stopped at Trafoi on his way from Vienna to Italy. In forgetting the name of “Signorelli” and in thinking first of “Botticelli,” whose works he knew well, and then of “Boltraffio,” who was for him a minor figure in the Milanese school, Freud found significant connections with that lapse (and his repressed thought) and with his inability to recapture the familiar name of the great master of Orvieto. “Signor” was replaced by “Bo” in the two substituted names; “Bo” corresponded in his memory to the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which he was travelling and where the anec- dote of his doctor friend was located. “Traffio” in Boltraffio’s name, he supposed, was (obviously) suggested by “Trafoi” (in Tyrol), where Freud had been disturbed by the news of his impotent patient’s suicide. Finally, “Signor” in “Signorelli” trans- lates to “Herr,” the respectful German term with which the Turks of the Austrian province addressed the physician. The repressed comment about sexuality and death had led to repression of the potent term “Herr”—associated with the first syllable of the name of the Balkan province “Herzegovina”—equivalent of the Italian for “Sir”—“Signor”—in the artist’s name. All this gave rise in turn to names with the first syllables “Bot” and “Bol” of the names of the artists “Botticelli” and “Boltraffio,” which came to his mind in searching for the repressed “Signorelli.” This detached explanation has appeared so convincing that it has been quot- ed in expositions of psychoanalytic method and theory and accompanied by Freud’s diagram illustrating schematically the vectors in the dynamic process of forgetting and the groping efforts of recovering substitutions. Still, I find an aspect of arbitrariness in the ingenious example. Of Freud’s conversation and thoughts, just before forgetting, we are told only what he has selected for his explanation. Can it be that the explanation is itself a continuing stage of repression, and perhaps a further evasion of the unpleasant? One can understand Freud’s association of Bosnia and Trafoi in “Boltraffio,” even if we 3. Schapiro’s translation. 4. Ibid. On Freud’s Forgetting of “Signorelli” 127 doubt it (especially since Trafoi is in the Austrian Tyrol). But why the “Her” of “Herzegovina”? And why “Herr” in the Turks’ address to the doctor should be translated to “Signor” in the “unconscious” is unclear. Does the unconscious not respect morphemes and syllables in isolating (or abstracting) phonemes to suit the narrator’s purpose? One possible association, closer to himself and surely impor- tant for the repressing mind, was ignored by Freud: the “Sig” of “Signorelli” as the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00338/1754238/octo_a_00338.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 first syllable of “Sigmund,” Freud’s own given name.5 With this possible association in mind, let us try to reconstruct Freud’s forgetting. Freud stops himself abruptly as he is about to complete to his German fellow traveler a medical colleague’s story of the Turks of that region who regard the loss of potency as death. Freud recalls his impotent patient’s suicide. Perhaps his own potency was in question. From a letter he wrote to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, before his trip to Italy and the Balkans, we learn that Freud had ceased to have sexual relations with his wife.6 In that chat on the train ride he suddenly switched the subject to art, which in his own thought is, for artists and art lovers, a sublimation of sexuality. He recalls then the frescoes of Orvieto, in which appear superb naked figures of paired men and women in scenes of the end of days and the resurrection of the dead. At one side of the scene, as spectators, stand the clothed painter Signorelli, a robust man of late middle age, and, next to him, the monk Fra Angelico, a celibate ascetic artist in monk’s robes, who had begun the decoration of the ceiling vault of that chapel fifty or sixty years before, which he had left unfinished. Freud had read and admired the critic Giovanni Morelli, who had written of the frescoes at Orvieto: “These masterpieces appear to me unequalled in the art of the fifteenth century; for to no other contemporary painter was it given to endow the human frame with a like degree of passion, vehemence and strength.”7 The viewing of these frescoes must have been an absorbing emotional expe- rience to Freud, a reminder of his own mortality and impotence—and perhaps of his sick wife, whom he had just brought for convalescence to Ragusa on the Adriatic in Bosnia before leaving her for that sight-seeing trip through the province—with consoling thoughts of immortality through his continuing intellec- tual powers and projects. Had the forgetful person been a patient, Freud would have drawn him out and asked for more associations until he had elicited from him one that related to the forgetter’s sexual life—as he was to do in the second chapter of his 5. Freud signed his letters to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess during the years 1897 and 1898 “Sigm”—which is hardly an intimate form of Sigmund.

Load more