1. Klein (1975), Beers (1992), Sprengnether (1990), Rizzuto (1998), and Brown (1959) do examine fantasies associating death and the mother; Homans (1989: 98) links Freud's attitude toward his own mother with fantasies of mortality and immortality. But none of these theorists have noted the more complex connections among these ideas.

2. See Freud's essay “On Negation,” in which he argues that negation or denial represent proof of repression and therefore proof of the psychic reality of an idea. Here, apparently, a denial is just a denial, to paraphrase Freud's famous line about cigars.

3. Freud's theory of the death instinct may have emerged from his perceptions of cancerous cell growth within his own body: David Bakan suggests that Freud's attunement to the unconscious allowed him to perceive the most subtle physiological and endopsychic processes at the cellular level (1966: 156–78). Freud's speculations on cellular death wishes and cellular forms of deathlessness (Unsterblichkeit) are not far from current Wndings in microbiology. Clark (1996) discusses the theory of a cellular suicide gene, while Gold (1985) describes the deactivation of the “death gene” in the apparently deathless “HeLa” cells.

4. Here, Freud links misogyny with homosexuality. Elsewhere, Boyarin (1997) points out, Freud associates misogyny with homophobia.

5. This is not Freud's only reference to these words. They appear as well in a letter to Fliess in 1899 (Masson 1985: 343), in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” and in “Death and Us,” a lecture presented to the B'nai B'rith

6. See Anzieu and Rohde-Dachser for different interpretations of this passage. According to Anzieu, the displacement is not an indication of atheism, but of a “disturbing mother Wgure” (1986: 365). Rohde-Dachser, a feminist critic, argues that Freud's personal experience of the mother is of subordinate importance. More significant, she suggests, are the connections between nature, mother, and death in Freud's theory of culture (1991: 133).

7. As we saw in chapter 1, in Freud's “specimen dream” of Irma's injection in The Interpretation of Dreams, he noted his associations to a dream image of “three women”: his wife, the nearly dead Irma, and Irma's friend. This dream of one woman who is actually three women was the context for Freud's first reference to the “navel of the dream” where interpretation ceases. Freud hinted at the dangerous nature of the triple woman or triple goddess in a letter to Fliess written shortly after Wnishing The Interpretation of Dreams, just as he was beginning his next project: “I would have liked to write to you about the sexual theory … it is only that I do not yet have the slightest idea what to do with the +++ female aspect, and that makes me distrust the whole thing” (Masson 1985: 382). Masson explains in a footnote: “Freud draws three crosses. This sign was sometimes chalked on the inside of doors in peasant houses to protect against danger” (382). Three crosses, three women: Freud seems to encounter dangerous, deadly women at every turn. His (partial) solution to this danger lies in his attempt to analyze it.

8. When Freud was given an ancient Grecian vase by Marie Bonaparte, he thanked her by saying, “It's a pity one can't take it to the grave” (Jones 1957: 169). Ironically, Bonaparte's gift did become, in a sense, Freud's casket. His ashes were put in the vase after his death.

9. See Rohde-Dachser (1991: 134), who notes Freud's persistent association of nature, death or Thanatos, and the mother. Sprengnether notes these connections as well: “Freud associates woman not only with the beginning of life but also with its end so that the Wgure of the mother fuses with that of death” (Sprengnether 1995: 5; cf. 153).

10. I concur with Kofman's view in this instance. However, I extend the argument beyond Kofman's, showing that Freud's complex and overdetermined compulsion to return to the animate/inanimate mechanical woman as a source of the uncanny is related to a rethinking of the trope of the “uncanny Jew” (a “living corpse,” both “living and dead”) (Shapiro 1997). See chapter 3.

11. An anticipation of these ideas on the “double” is present in a comment Freud made in a letter to Fliess after Fliess's pregnant wife and mother-in-law had been ill. “How uncanny,” Freud wrote, “when mothers are shaky. They stand between us and [our] replacement.” Quoted in Rizzuto (1998): 200, brackets in Rizzuto. “Our replacement,” like the double, is closely associated with the uncanny, with mothers, and with death. Rizzuto shows that Masson (1985: 358) and others have mistranslated the passage (Rizzuto 1998: 199–200).

12. Joan Riviere's translation in the Collected Papers captures Freud's German better than Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition (SE 17: 244).

13. Lydenberg also notes this pattern: Freud's argument “brings him back twice to the uncanniness of the mother's body through the same textual sequence: a disquieting multiplicity of examples of the uncanny leads to a reference to the maternal body whereupon Freud ends the paragraph and inserts a break in the text” (1997: 1077).

14. See Rheingold for a discussion of clinical literature on the fantasy of death as a heavenly experience of reunion with the mother (1967: 12–13).

15. In “The Uncanny,” the absence of God takes the shape of the presence of God's negative, the demons who replace the gods upon the collapse of religion: “The double has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons” (SE 17: 236).