Young Freud's linkage with Persia

Abstract

Sigmund Freud's hands helped to mutilate a volume containing a series of “colored plates” like the one replicated in Figure 1 in the text. As a young adult, his personal library included a fairytale whose German text was entitled Die Träumleiter: Ein Marchen. No one has yet been able to authenticate the author's identity beyond the following imprint: “S. Andreas (1832).” The poetic play centers upon a celestial meeting featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dschami. It has been translated into English (The dream ladder: A fairy tale), but still awaits a psychoanalytically informed exegesis.

Keywords:

• Colored plate
• elusive fairytale
• Persia
• Andreas's Weltliteratur

Notes

¹Readers may raise the possibility that “S[?]” Andreas was related to Friedrich Carl Andreas (1862–1930), who was the Professor of Oriental Languages at Göttingen University. It is known that his Armenian father moved from Persia to Hamburg in 1852. It was apparently customary in Persian feuds for the defeated family to change its name, which resulted in the adoption of the surname “Andreas” notwithstanding their reputed royal lineage (i.e. the Barratuni clan). Lou Andreas-Salomé ultimately designated the out-of-wedlock baby born to her husband during their marriage as her heiress after his death (Behling, 2005).

²Dschami/Djami, Moulana Nuro'd-Din 'Abdo'r Rahmen, was a Persian poet, scholar, and Sufi mystic. He was born on October 7, 1414 in Khargerd at Djam (present-day Torbat-e-jam in the district of Khorasan, Iran) and died on October 9, 1492 in the city of Herat, which is now located in Afghanistan. Djami was considered to be the greatest poet of his age. He wrote close to 50 works, among them 3 divans, 7 longer romantic or didactic poems, and several pieces concerning Islamist, principally Sunni, theology and mysticism. Other works include tracts about rhetoric, poetics, and Arab grammar.

³Events in the “sky-world”—by way of contrast—as articulated via the crosscultural perspectives of a contemporary psychoanalyst-scholar, “were a matter of considerable focus in the religious cosmologies of Native American peoples” (Foulks, 2005, p. 217).

⁴According to tradition, Mohammed fell asleep on a carpet in his cousin's home. His sleep was broken by the voice of the Angel Gabriel, calling upon him to mount a winged horse and be carried through the sky. The horse bore Mohammed to Mount Sinai where the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, then to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and then to Heaven, where Mohammed met Adam, Noah, Enoch, Moses, Isaac, Elijah, and Jesus. Mohammed was told that he was the last prophet and was to be raised up from his grave on Resurrection Day.

⁵According to the adult Freud (1930), “Goethe was not only, as a poet, a great self-revealer, but also, in spite of the abundance of autobiographical records, a careful concealer” (p. 220). In a similar vein, Hanns Sachs (1944) reported: “We were standing in front of … Goethe's works which filled three … book-shelves. Freud said, pointing towards it, ‘All this was used by him as a means of self-concealment’ …” (p. 105). Yet, when we peruse the text of Freud's (1900) Botanical Monograph Dream, two disparate “disconnects” are encountered within the space of a single paragraph, to wit: “For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue then interpretation of this dream any further” and “There is … no need to carry the interpretation of this dream any further” (p. 173).