Anthony Stadlen: 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.... (if I
remember rightly -- I am in Athens, away from almost all my books) 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." ...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]).
JM: Thanks again, Anthony
Stadlen, for the amusing anedoctes that bring together Freud and
umbrellas. This is one of the advantages of an open-forum List, our information
is constantly being renewed to acquire a measure of
precision. My Cedarn cave is not in Athens, but
what I wrote relied solely on what I could still remember,
items which helped me to plot the words for a google search to offer
adequate links,nothing more. With old age memory
tends to function too selectively. This is why, even after your
description, the two stories were a novelty and a delight to me
( Bernheim's experiment was, of course, impossible to forget
because such a lot of the Freudian theory derives from his
confrontation with Bernheim's demonstration.)
I'll use the present opportunity to correct
something I set down in a former posting about the similarity I
found bt. Freud's and Nabokov's ideals ( life as an open system
which constantly adds to it new traits and developments). In the same
article ("Beyond the Pleasure Principle") where Freud concluded that there
is no "basic drive for perfection," and that growth takes place
solely because a living organism must cope with the external
obstacles that cross its direct path towards its goal ( a return
to a basic equilibrium, ie, to Nirvana and death...), he postulated a
second drive that would be working alongside his initial basic drive (ie,
Eros, the "Life-Instinct"), namely an active "Death Drive".
Freud now includes the effects of entropy and describes its internal
operation opposing life's unceasing
strife towards progressive complexity and differenciation. The
addition of a fundamental "Todestrieb" interacting with life changes the
initial picture I brought up, when I compared Nabokov's and Freud's
ideals! There's no "hereafter", no transmigrating souls and no
"metempsychosis" to be read in Freud and his dire vision of "eternity.".