1. The Future of an Illusion was begun in the spring of 1927, Wnished by September, and published in November 1927 (SE 21: 3); “Fetishism” was Wnished in August 1927 and published almost simultaneously (SE 21: 149).

2. See Homans (1989 and 1998) for a careful analysis of the symbolic loss engendered by the break with Jung and the role of Karl Abraham in the process of grieving that led to Freud's self-understanding, productivity, and creative work.

3. This is Phillips's translation.

4. Freud's question about why such truth and self-understanding is particularly accessible to the melancholic is reminiscent of the famous question posed to Oskar Pfister in 1918: “Why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” (Meng and Freud 1963: 63). Freud's remarks in “Mourning and Melancholia” reflect a notion of the Jew as one with both a keener eye for truth and a melancholic disposition. “Mourning and Melancholia” thus hints obliquely at an association of the melancholic and the Jew. We shall see, however, that Jews take both the

5. Or perhaps the poet represents a Wctionalized version of the poet Goethe?

6. “On Transience” can be productively read in relation to “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” written just a few months earlier, in which Freud expresses rage and derision toward Jung, indicative of a temporary inability to mourn (Homans 1998: 77). By the time he wrote “On Transience,” Freud had begun to come to terms with the loss of Jung as a member of the psychoanalytic movement.

7. Freud's interpretation of dreams of journeys as dreams of death (SE 5: 385) may be the appropriate hermeneutic here.

8. Santner, in an analysis of the “crisis of investiture” (by which he means disruptions in social roles and status) from which both the Nazi “Final Solution” and the paranoid and messianic fantasies of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber emerged (Schreber 1903), suggests that Freud's psychoanalytic theory represented an alternate reconstruction of this crisis. Freud was particularly sensitive to the crises and disruptions of modernity (1996: 17). Not unlike Homans, Santner sees fascism and psychoanalysis as opposite responses to the crises invoked by modernity.

9. The terror over the thought that his mother “might come to hear of [his] death” was shared by other members of Freud's family. According to a letter Freud wrote to his nephew Samuel in 1925, Amalie Freud could not tolerate hearing about any death in the family. Through a familial conspiracy of silence, she was protected from the knowledge of several deaths over many years: “We made a secret of all the losses in the family” (Clark 1980: 481).

10. Poor health prevented his attendance. His daughter Anna had become his emissary to many public events and ceremonies.

11. Donald Capps suggests that Carl Jung and Erik Erikson (along with psychologist William James and phenomenologist Rudolf Otto) experienced traumatic separations from their mothers which led to lifelong struggles with “melancholia” (Capps 1997). This melancholic disposition, in Capps's view, directed these men inexorably toward a psychological, introspective, and highly individualized encounter with religious ideas. Extending Capps's thesis, one might expect to Wnd a similar relationship with the mother in Freud's case, since Freud clearly shared this psychological approach to religion with these four thinkers. Freud's response to his mother's death would seem to confirm

12. In Sprengnether's view, Freud's dificulty acknowledging feelings of hostility toward the mother is not only an important element of his personal life, but also an important influence on the creation of the Oedipal theory: the Oedipal theory deflects rage toward the mother, redirecting it toward the father. She argues, “The Oedipal theory performs the function of acknowledging the anger … (murderous wishes directed toward the father) while enshrining an idealized memory of maternal love (mother-son incest)” (1995: 46, parentheses in the original). Other scholars, as well, have investigated the significance of Freud's relationship with his mother—and with the Catholic nursemaid or nanny employed by the Freud family during his first three years—for the later development of psychoanalytic theory. These scholars emphasize particular traumas in Freud's early childhood: the birth and death of a younger sibling, Julius, who lived only a few months, the close relationship with the nursemaid and her dismissal from the family's employment when Freud was less than three, and the family's move from Freiburg, Moravia (Pribor, Czechoslovakia) to Vienna in Freud's third year. In general, Freud's mother, Amalie, is described in this literature as narcissistically invested in her first-born child, her “Goldener Sigi.” At the same time, she is seen as emotionally untrustworthy, and the loss of the nursemaid is seen as traumatic. As a result of his early experiences, these theorists argue, Freud's feelings toward his mother were fraught with conflict, anxiety, and fear of loss and abandonment which he was unable to express. These feelings were reflected, in turn, in the theories he constructed (Atwood and Stolorow 1993: 57–59; Roith 1987: 170; Sagan 1988; Margolis 1996; Sprengnether 1995, 1995; Rizzuto 1998). While these analyses of Freud's relationship with his mother and the origins of psychoanalytic theory are provocative, they ignore some important issues. First, while Sprengnether and others are correct that the Oedipal theory idealizes the mother-son relationship, we have seen that another picture of the mother emerges occasionally. We have traced in this volume the surfacing of the uncanny mother and the dead or deadly mother in Freud's texts. There is as much evidence for a non-Oedipal counterthesis as for the Oedipal masterplot

13. See Schiesari's complex analysis of the “gendering of melancholia” (1992). See also Sprengnether's analysis of the “open wound” of Emma Eckstein's botched surgery (1990: 22–38; 181–86).