Freud Visits the Acropolis, Cannot Believe It
In 1904, Freud and his younger brother departed for the Greek island of Corfu on holiday. Freud had recently published The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; he was 48. A friend in Trieste said that Corfu would be too hot and advised them to go to Athens instead; a boat was leaving that afternoon. Though they complied with this advice—they had always wanted to go to Athens—they became discontent and irresolute while waiting at the port; they feel it is too difficult to go to Athens. They stop talking to each other. They become depressed. And yet when the boat arrives they board without a word and shortly they find themselves transported to the Acropolis. Freud, standing there in the ruins, is astonished; he is filled with huge and ambivalent feelings so that reality begins to distort; he doubts that what he is experiencing is real. “By the evidence of my senses I am now standing on the Acropolis,” he says. “But I cannot believe it.”
32 years later when recounting this experience in an open letter to Romain Rolland, Freud claims that he split into two persons: one who could not believe that he stood on the Acropolis—that ancient Greece really existed as he had been told in school; and one who could not believe that he could not believe it. He likens the experience to the incredulity of someone encountering the Loch Ness monster stranded on the shores of Loch Ness. He has a sense of rapid time-travel into his own youth; he thinks that he must have never really believed in the Acropolis. The unreal ruins deliver him a “conviction that reaches down into the unconscious.”
He calls this paradoxical displacement of reality by wish fulfillment a “de-realization;” and relates it to the depression he and his brother both felt in Trieste: a kind of sad incredulity, like the unreal feeling that it is “too good to be true.” These alienating feelings “serve the purpose of defense; they aim at keeping something away from the ego.” As the old Freud realizes, his school-boy self did not disbelieve the Acropolis, rather he disbelieved that he would ever be worldly enough to visit there. The sadness beforehand, the unreality, the estrangement are the return of a child’s severe super-ego; an repudiation of the desire to travel by the race and class conscience of his youth, the narrow views of his wool-merchant father who would not have cared about the Acropolis, and who was dead.
While Freud makes no mention of his own psychosomatic reaction—"a certain amount of reserve surrounds the whole episode”—he does speak of those persons who, in similar situations, “fall ill, or even go entirely to pieces because an overwhelmingly powerful wish has been fulfilled.” This is the Stendhal Syndrome as such: “the sufferer does not permit themselves happiness.” The happiness they are not permitted becomes an alienation that may be expressed in the body; by dizziness, fainting, tachycardia, seizure and so on. Freud perhaps had no bodily response to the Acropolis (that we know of) because of his psychoanalytic standpoint; he was able to channel his emotions through his own self-reflexive archeology. This is why he splits into two persons: the possessed and the analyst.
Freud’s account contradicts my own view of the Stendhal syndrome. While he finds a defended ego, I find an undefended one. The explanation of his experience is sound and I have no doubt that emotions regarding his father played a central role; but he is being a bit coy about his love of ancient Greece. IMO he was a real fanboy of this history and being there at ground zero of western thought rocked his ass.
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