by André Aciman
Sometimes I like to think that I am retracing Freud’s footsteps in Rome—the Hotel Eden, the Vatican Museums, the Pincio, San Pietro in Vincoli. I like the tone of scholarly seriousness that recalling Freud’s visits casts on my stay in Rome; it screens what I might really be after here and makes my interest in the city feel less troubling, less urgent, less primal or personal. After seeing the Caravaggios in Piazza del Popolo, I am sitting down at Caffè Rosati and ordering a chinotto. This piazza, after all, is the very spot where an ecstatic Goethe realized he had finally entered Rome.
I am in Rome, but I am not particularly surprised or, for that matter, as rapturous as I had hoped. Perhaps this is just my oblique way of asking Rome to startle me with something new, something forgotten, or with something that might jump-start the full realization of being back in a city that I know I love, though this love isn’t always easy to find and needs to be rummaged for like an old glove lost in a drawer filled with socks. All year long I’ve been waiting for this morning at Caffè Rosati, where I knew I’d order a chinotto, buy the paper, and let my mind drift to Winckelmann and Goethe and to the statue of Apollo that I still fear I’ll never see. Instead, something holds me back and makes me think of Freud, who grew to love Rome and felt at home here. That is how I want to feel. I want to be in the moment, feel that I belong here. But I don’t know how that is done. I’m not even sure that I do want to feel I belong here. Something tells me that I’m really here to think of Freud, not of the Apollo Sauroktonos or of the Torlonias or of Winckelmann. But I’m not sure of this either. Perhaps I am here because Rome and I have unfinished business dating back to my adolescence. But then, come to think of it, Freud is not irrelevant to that either.
* * *
On September 2, 1901, at the age of forty-four, Freud finally arrived in Rome. He had already been to Italy several times and could have visited Rome before but was held back owing to a psychological reluctance that critics and biographers have alternatively called his “Roman phobia” or “Rome neurosis.” Freud was well aware that some buried inhibition kept preventing him from visiting a city that, from his early school days, must have occupied a significant portion of his imagination. Young Freud was exceptionally well read and, like so many pupils in Vienna, was not only conversant with the classics and ancient history but enamored with the art of antiquity. He knew its monuments, was spellbound by archaeology, and probably loved everything about Rome and Athens long before visiting either city. And yet we know, as he knew himself, that something stood in his way.
Freud attempted to fathom the reason behind his phobia, but his explanation hardly scratches the surface. Critics and biographers have offered Freudian or pseudo-Freudian interpretations of the man Freud by using material from his correspondence and his Interpretation of Dreams to understand what Rome meant to the forty-four-year-old Viennese doctor. Their theories range from the plausible to the contrived to downright psychobabble. Some hold that Freud might have been reluctant to realize his long-cherished dream of reaching Rome because he had been nurturing the dream for far too long to confront it as anything bordering on the real. A facile non-explanation. Others suggest that he was totally unnerved by the mere thought of so many layers in the history and archaeology of the city. Hardly a better explanation. There are many others.
Perhaps Freud felt unworthy of visiting the idealized capital of Western civilization. Or, being a Jew, perhaps he wavered before visiting the very heart of Christendom, especially after flirting with, but ultimately rejecting, the prospect of converting to Christianity. Or, following in Goethe’s tracks, perhaps he preferred Ancient Rome but had no inclination for the modern metropolis, which would have stood in the way of the old. Or perhaps everything about Rome was underscored by disquieting memories of his Jewish father, or by his guilty conscience as a Jew, or by his suspicion that Rome had become a metaphor for something desired that he was not too eager to probe. As he wrote to his friend and colleague Fliess, “My longing for Rome is deeply neurotic … a cloak and symbol for several other hotly longed-for wishes.” In the words of Freud’s biographer Peter Gay, Rome was a “supreme prize and incomprehensible menace,” a “charged and ambivalent symbol … [standing] for Freud’s most potent concealed erotic, and only slightly less concealed aggressive wishes.” This is extremely strong language for what might easily have passed for the typical apprehensions of someone thinking of traveling far from his cushy home in Vienna. Erotic? Aggressive?
Freud knew that what he was going to discover would be a real city, not some illustrated pop-up book sold to tourists. And perhaps he knew himself well enough to fear that so desired a visit, apart from stirring great joy, might easily be met with disappointment or, worse yet, with numbness or dismay. Once visited, Rome would no longer hold the allure of a Rome unvisited.
In this Freud was in good company. Goethe had felt a vague sense of bewildered incredulity more than a century earlier when, as a starry-eyed northerner, he finally arrived in Rome. As he writes on November 1, 1786, “I was still afraid I might be dreaming; it was not till I had passed through the Porta del Popolo that I was certain it was true, that I really was in Rome.” A few lines later, he adds: “All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember—my father hung views of Rome in the hall—I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long … is now assembled before me. Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world.” To complicate things, Freud himself put forward an explanation for his Roman anxiety by examining several of his dreams about Rome. One explanation, which even the more enlightened and canny theorists have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, was the theory of the ambitious and combative Jew trying to right the long history of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora—Freud as conquistador, to use Freud’s own words, as triumphant liberator. Another theory put forward by Freud himself is that his allegiance as a Jew was not to Rome, a city whose history from antiquity to the modern age had been intolerant of and cruel to Jews, but to the Carthaginian general Hannibal, a Semite and Rome’s nemesis. But this theory is not so persuasive either, particularly since Freud’s unquestioned love of classical history, literature, art, and archaeology would have made his loyalty to Carthage rather thin-skinned. After all, Freud, as far as we know, never traveled to Carthage or even expressed a desire to go there. Instead, after visiting Rome that first time in 1901, he returned at least six more times. He had passed the test, and having passed it once felt free to come back to Rome for the rest of his life. The allegiance to Hannibal feels like a canard, a decoy of sorts meant to throw everyone off the scent, possibly himself included. If anything, both Freud and Hannibal shared one thing in common: not just their Semitic origin or their determination to stand and fight for what they believed in but, as Freud knew so well, when it came to the much-awaited moment, both he and Hannibal stalled outside the gates of Rome. Hannibal ante portas. Freud ante portas.
* * *
Freud’s hesitation reminds me of Goethe’s own. “What I want to see,” writes Goethe in his Italian Journey, “is the Everlasting Rome, not the Rome which is replaced by another every decade.” What Goethe means by Everlasting Rome isn’t clear. Is it the Rome of antiquity, or is it something more elusive yet, not modern, not ancient, not anything, really, but a confluence of all the Romes that have ever existed and will always exist? We’ll never know.
There are many Romes. Some belong to different ages and go back twenty-five hundred years, while others aren’t old enough to have been given a name yet. Etruscan Rome, Republican Rome, Imperial Rome, paleo-Christian Rome, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, eighteenth-century Rome, van Wittel’s Rome, Piranesi’s Rome, Puccini’s Rome, Fellini’s Rome, contemporary Rome—and so many, many more. All are so thoroughly different that they couldn’t possibly be the same city. Yet each is built into, on top of, under, or against the other, and sometimes with stones stripped and looted from one Rome to build another.
A Roman today doesn’
t have to know anything about the past or that there are major differences between, say, an ancient Roman called Agrippa and another called Agrippina, but even the most boorish born-and-bred Roman, who’s never seen the Forum or the Coliseum or bothered to read Virgil to know why Via Niso and Via Eurialo run into each other, will guess that the streets must have something to do with the past. Everything in Rome has something to do with the past. Antiquity is all over the place, which is another way of saying that time, however one lives one’s life in Rome, is the busiest thoroughfare in the city. You cross time even when you’re not thinking of time. You touch time the moment you lean on a wall to tie a shoelace and realize that this old, flaking wall was already quite old when men like Goethe, Byron, and Stendhal stood by it and remembered that Winckelmann himself must have touched this very same wall and then rubbed his hands to shake off the same dust that Michelangelo himself must have rubbed against. Everything is old and layered here, and epochs, like throwaway goods in a flea market, are haplessly bundled together, so that you really can’t tell one from the other. The new, the modern, the cutting edge always bear traces of the old. It’s no different with the people. Romans feel old. Children are wiser than their years, and grown-ups, for all their bursts of ill temper, have learned to make allowances for things you wouldn’t put up with anywhere else. Whatever irritated you today already happened once, happens all the time, will definitely happen again. Rome is immortal not because there is so much beauty that no one wishes to see perish but because time is everywhere and nowhere, nothing really dies, and all things come back. We come back. Rome is a palimpsest written over many times.
Freud’s description of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents speaks to this in far more eloquent terms. For Freud, Rome is the perfect metaphor for the human psyche and ultimately for the human experience. Nothing stays buried forever, all things resurface, and all ultimately lead into, feed off, and abut others.
In Freud’s view, Rome was built layer upon layer, from the oldest crisscrossed “Roma Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the Palatine,” to “the … federation of … settlements on the different hills,” to “the city bounded by the Servian wall,” and, later still, to “the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls.” “Many of the walls still hold up,” writes Freud, the lover of antiquity, but “of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area [the visitor] will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist no longer … Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction.”
Freud must have loved the idea of ruins that are not the original ruins but ruins of subsequent restorations—in other words, ruins many times over, reminiscent of Schliemann’s multitiered, imbricated city of Troy, built over time, one tier over the other.
But Freud, after seemingly mapping out so stirring a portrait of layered Rome, suddenly changes tack and proceeds to a bolder analogy yet, reminding his reader that “in mental life, nothing that has once been formed can perish.” Nothing disappears, nothing is ever pulverized. In his view, moreover, the very notion of sequential tiers, where tier one comes before tier two, and tier two before tier three, is not correct enough, for things do not necessarily simply antedate one another, either in Rome or in the life of the human psyche. Instead of a sequential manner, Freud proposes an audacious model, suggesting that what was originally present and is now past can continue to survive, not necessarily underneath what is visible but alongside its latest incarnation. “What is primitive is … commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it.”
This preposition, alongside, is key to Freud’s Rome. The ancestor lives not below its descendant, or even just alongside its descendant, but—to push the point—the ancestor becomes its descendant. It’s as if the original pagan script on a palimpsest not only never disappeared, or continued to exist contemporaneously with the text written over it—it may even overshadow what came after. The later rubs against the earlier, and the earlier talks back to the later.
Freud understood that what comes earlier never disappears but coexists with what comes later. As Freud writes, “Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity … In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having to be removed [my emphasis]—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site [my emphasis], the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built.”
But Freud is uncomfortable with this inspired if chimerical flight of fancy, which seems exaggerated as far as Rome is concerned. The vision of a space untouched by time, where old buildings stand not just alongside newer ones but are embedded in them as well, where ancient Roman monuments that had been plundered of their stones can be nested in the same exact space as latter-day palaces built with those selfsame plundered stones, is a surrealist vision that Freud can’t countenance for long. You cannot dismantle the bronze portals of Rome’s Pantheon and have them molten to build Bernini’s baldachin in Saint Peter’s and still expect the Pantheon and Saint Peter’s to contain the same bronze parts. Freud is not at all wrong in suggesting that all of Roman history is present in every single instance of the city; he simply cannot visualize—or refuses to visualize—how two buildings can coexist on the same spot.
Freud was fond of the archaeological model and would probably subscribe to the vision of wobbly tectonic plates constantly hurtling against and displacing one another; but the image of multiple time zones cohabiting alongside one another is too much for him. And so, the very man who tells his patients to probe their wildest fantasies takes back the whole fantasy: “There is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms, we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents.” Freud’s stratified analogy had served its purpose, and this is where it ends. No point in taking it any further, he says.
And yet what Freud had done, perhaps unconsciously, when invoking Rome as a metaphor for the psyche was to tap into something altogether unthinkable. Not the succession of time zones—which is entirely thinkable—but the collapsing and eventual erasure of temporal zones.
Like Freud’s fantasized Rome, where layers of time zones are constantly being reshuffled, the psyche may be likened to a soufflé in the making, where desire, fantasy, experience, and memory are all being folded into one another, without sequence or logic or the semblance of a coherent narrative. To paraphrase Julia Child, folding is a sort of zigzagging, figure-eight movement of the rubber scraper, which takes the mixture to the top, folds it back toward the bottom, then takes what was just folded at the bottom back to the top again. What was past is present, what will be future is past, and what can never be might return time and time again.
Rome, the eternal landfill, is nothing more than a hodgepodge of constantly reshuffled and refolded tenses: mostly the past tense, marginally the present, and heavily the conditional and subjunctive moods, all merging in a medley that linguists call irrealis moods, that indescribable, counterfactual time zone where we mortals spend most of our days with might-have-beens that haven’t really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening and might still happen, though we hope—and fear—they both will and never will happen.
Each of these clauses in the previous sentence does not necessarily contradict or dispel the one before or after it
but rather seeks to augment it and to fold it in by incorporating it in a series of what could easily be called, as in music, a moto perpetuo of 180-degree turns and reversals.
Caught between the no more and the not yet, between maybe and already, or between never and always, irrealis moods have no tale to tell—no plot, no narrative, just the intractable hum of desire, fantasy, memory, and time. Irrealis moods can’t really even be written in, much less thought in.
But they’re where we live.
The problem with Freud’s archaeological analogy is not that he is conflicted about it because it is fanciful but that the analogy itself is simply unwieldy. Things move in time, and things move in space; for the analogy to really work, they have to move on both planes simultaneously—and this Freud, who was by no means averse to counterfactual thinking, dismisses as fantasy. Freud simply cannot visualize how perennial place and perpetual time are continuously coincident. Such thinking is not only counterfactual, it is counterintuitive.
Part of the reason for Freud’s discomfort with such thinking may be that he is using a spatial metaphor for time, which would be like using an apple metaphor for oranges. Part of it may also be that Freud is unable to think of time without invoking space, but that trying to think of space in that context automatically occludes his very thinking about time.
I suspect, however, that the problem lies elsewhere. Freud may be using an archaeological metaphor, but what is subsumed in his vision of time is not excavation, which is vertical and moves one layer at a time—historically, chronologically, diachronically—but something quite different.
* * *
Irrealis moods speak not the language of psycho-archaeologists but of water dowsers, who understand not excavation but a phenomenon called remanence. Remanence is the retention of residual magnetism in an object long after the external magnetic force has been removed. Remanence is the memory of something that has vanished and left no trace of itself but that, like a missing limb, continues to exert its presence. The water is gone, but the dowsing rod responds to earth’s memory of water.