Freud's Trip to Orvieto: The Great Doctor's Unresolved Confrontation with Antisemitism, Death, and Homoeroticism; His Passion for Paintings; and the Writer in His Footsteps

by Nicholas Fox Weber

Overview

"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." —New Yorker

"Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." —John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar

"This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster

After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues.

What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman.

Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires.

Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942658269
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and founder and president of Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization devoted to medical care, education, and the arts in isolated villages in rural Senegal. He is the author of fourteen books, including Freud's Trip to Orvieto, biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier, and numerous exhibition catalogs. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications. He is married to the novelist Katharine Weber, has two adult daughters, and lives in Connecticut, Paris, and southwest Ireland.

Table of Contents

Freud's Memory Loss 11

1 The Reprint 17

2 Freud's Pilgrimages 26

3 The Text 31

4 The Karpes Continue 38

5 Freud's Trip 43

6 Names 46

7 Orvieto 48

8 What Richard and Marietta Say About All This 56

9 Fra Angelico 64

10 Antichrist 74

11 The Identity of the Antichrist 82

12 Maud Cruttwell 87

13 "A Godless Jew" 92

14 Am I a Mensch or a Wuss? 111

15 The Conquistador 122

16 Maud's Vision 126

17 Freud and the Etruscans 135

18 The Devil 140

19 The Entrance to Hell 147

20 Maleness 152

21 The Case of Luca Signorelli 157

22 Hannibal 165

23 Jackie 174

24 Our Bodies, Our Deaths 176

25 Grandpa's Funeral 179

26 Fathers and Sons 184

27 Enter Jean-Paul Sartre 193

28 Wanting to Be Hannibal 198

29 Richard and Marietta's Conclusion 204

30 What This Meant 209

31 Signorelli's Pinups 212

32 André Gide Blocked, Too 224

33 Zilboorg 230

34 Picturing Freud 233

35 The Man Who Felt Paintings in His Heart and Bones 239

36 Sarburgh 245

37 Raphael 248

38 Freud on Dostoevsky 254

39 The Titian 258

40 The Jew Again 264

41 The Letter to Fliess 273

42 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 280

43 Jacques Lacan's Take on It 285

44 Minna Bernays 287

45 Sobriety 296

46 The Search Continues 299

47 Wanting an Answer, and Yearning for the Authority That Will Provide One 303

48 The Young Blade 308

Afterword 311

Source Notes 320

Acknowledgments 328

One Last Gem 332

Index 333

Editorial Reviews

"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." —New Yorker

"A poignant memoir of Weber's childhood, a revealing portrait of his intellectual development and a incisive study on masculinity and Judaism. . . . [Freud's Trip to Orvieto] pulls together a series of elegant portraits, freely combining art history with memoir and psychoanalysis. . . . It strikes one as truthful, clear and revealing." —Art Newspaper

"[Weber's] vivid analysis brings faraway frescoes and lesser-known paintings into vigorous reality, and his idea that Freud suppressed Signorelli's name because of his reaction to the work's homoeroticism makes perfect sense when you explore the paintings with him." —Washington Independent Review of Books

"[Weber] captivates the reader with this wonderful psychological mystery. . . . Sometimes a molehill is just a molehill, but the process of making it into a mountain is both enthralling and illuminating in Weber's hands." —Winnipeg Free Press

"With an amalgam of relevant history, stunning art, and deft psychology, Weber brings new insights on the life and work of a cultural dynamo." —Library Journal (starred review)

"This witty, art-savvy project meanders in all manner of delightful directions." —Foreword Reviews

"A seminal study that is as informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking." —Midwest Book Review

"Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." —John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar

"This sui generis volume displays the author's polymathic talents at their exhilarating best. Not content with his role as critic, autobiographist, analysand, Freud scholar, Bauhaus curator, textual sleuth, and reflective Talmudist, Weber infuses familiar territory with freshness and vitality. His journey starts at Signorelli's Orvieto and Freud's legendary moment of forgetting. Via Breuer, Solnit, Sartre, Klee, Zweig, Raphael, Titian, as well as his personal inamoratas, we are granted new visions from the art and psychoanalytic worlds. Breathless but still upright, the reader understands better what it means to be a child, a parent, and a living, desiring, failing, dying, struggling, and ultimately triumphant human." —Jeremy Holmes, author of John Bowlby and Attachment Theory and The Therapeutic Imagination

"This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster

From the Publisher