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There are many links between Freud and umbrellas. For example, in
Studies on Hysteria (1895), in a remarkable footnote, Freud explains
how he got himself into the embarrassing situation of having attempted
to hypnotise an umbrella. In the presence of a young lady "hysteric"'s
father, he announced oracularly that her umbrella would (if I remember
rightly -- I am in Athens, away from almost all my books) break and she
would find that she could walk unaided. But fortunately, as she walked
next day on the Ringstrasse, she broke into song, singing the Robbers'
Chorus from Schiller's play, while beating time with her umbrella on
the pavement. Her umbrella obediently broke, and Freud's reputation was
saved. This story is almost worthy of Nabokov.
Again, in Freud's book on jokes (1905), he tells the joke that appeared
in a magazine: "A wife is like an umbrella; sooner or later one takes a
cab." This provides Freud with the starting-point for one of his most
impassioned paeans against bourgeois sexless marriage, presumably
including his own. He explains that the umbrella gives only limited
protection from the onslaught of one's passion, so that it becomes
necessary to resort to a "public vehicle": a prostitute.
More prosaically, forgetting an umbrella is routinely referred to (by,
among others, Freud himself, I am almost certain) as a paradigm of the
apparently meaningless but, from Freud's point of view, intentional and
meaningful slips and "Fehlleistungen" ("mischievements" in Walter
Kaufmann's translation, "parapraxes" in James Strachey's) charateristic
of what Freud called "the psyhopathology of everyday life" (1904
[1901]).
Anthony Stadlen