Balkan Geography and the

De-Orientalization of Freud
Duan I. Bjelic;

Abstract
The invention of the Balkans as Europes subaltern pre-dates Freud, but he
established future justification for curing the Balkans from its Oriental Yoke.
During a trip to the Balkans in the spring and summer of 1898, at the peak
of his self-analysis, Freud encountered his repressed sexuality, but his forbidden
desire helped him to craft the theory of the unconscious. On the one hand,
Freud relies on the Balkan subaltern and its potent libidinal force to challenge
established sexual dogma and the morality of the European bourgeoisie; on the
other hand, he declares the Balkans a dangerous zonepathological, anal,
archaic, and in need of Oedipalization. During his visit to the Acropolis in
1904, Freud had a brief glimpse into Western colonial geography and Orientalism as its constitutive bias, but he failed to develop a proper response to it since
he had regarded Orientalism to be part of being civilized and European.

The Acropolis and Freuds discovery/repression of Orientalism

As much as the myth of Oedipus was foundational for psychoanalysis, the
actual Greek and Balkan geography had a rupturing effect on Freuds
self-identity as an Aryan doctor. Edward Said has shown in Freud and the
non-European the ways in which Freud was fractured by geography as
European and non-European were both competing internally for Freuds
identity (2003). Freuds ambivalence regarding his Jewish identity, associated with his animosity toward his Oriental father, shaped his dilemma
of how to circumvent the appearance of anti-Semitic bias while, at the
same time, maintaining his adherence to the medical objectivity in which
it was grounded.1 Freuds attempt to resolve his dilemma by hiding his
self-orientalization behind (as if) racially blind epistemology had been
traumatically challenged by actual Balkan geographyas derealization
effect (Entfremdungsgefhl)at the turn of the century. To the extent that
a few broken marbles on the Acropolis and an abandoned Bosnian
harem in Trebinje had successfully challenged Freuds self-orientalization,
Journal of Modern Greek Studies 29 (2011) 2749 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Duan I. Bjelic;

Balkan geography should not be regarded as a mute exterior or unconscious projection but as an intelligible form of lifeas if a subject itself,
a multitude, rupturing, in the case of Freud, his Aryan ideological fantasy
(Gourgouris 1996:127). In this regard, following Antonio Gramscis and
Saids discourse-geographies, this essay is a land-based-discourse on the
Balkans.
Freud made three trips to the Balkans. His third and perhaps most
painful encounter with the contradictory forces of Balkan geography took
place in 1904, when he climbed the Acropolis with his brother Alexander.
In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, he recounts the
profound sense of dislocation he experienced upon actually looking at the
ancient site: a remarkable thought suddenly entered my mind: So all
this really does exist, just as we learnt at school! Retrospectively, Freud
accounts for the self-splitting in the face of entering the Acropolis:
To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression
to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually observable,
from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were
astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though
he were obliged, under the impact of unequivocal observation, to believe
in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. If I may
make a slight exaggeration, it was as if someone, walking beside Loch Ness,
suddenly caught sight of the form of the famous Monster stranded upon
the shore and found himself driven to the admission: So it really does
existthe sea-serpent we always disbelieved in! The second person, on
the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware
that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around
it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather
some expression of delight or admiration. (1964:240241)

To properly understand the force of geography here causing Freuds selfsplitting, we should at the outset of the analysis point out the temporal
displacement of Freuds deferred account. His essay was written in 1936,
thirty-two years after the experience it describes and three years before his
death. Stathis Gourgouris, in his seminal book on Greek/Balkan nationalism, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern
Greece, analyzes Freuds report in the context of Europes Philhellenic
ideological fantasy and its relation to the German national character at
the time when the Third Reich is in full blossom (1996:126,123).
Gourgouriss analysis elucidates Freuds relationship to German
Philhellenism as a colonial fantasy. Such a fantasy constitutes a desire
for civilization and is tantamount to a displacement of Hellenes from
a historical entity to an ontological condition. Nor is it surprising that
Freud, educated in a Viennese Gymnasium, would experience on the

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29

Acropolis a disturbance of memory reflecting the Hellenic fantasy

inculcated by the classical education he had received. But, Gourgouris
asks, How does one see a phantasm? How does one confront ones
social imaginary? It is no doubt a monstrous experience, and in this
sense Freuds invocation of the Loch Ness Monster is, Gourgouris insists,
right on the mark. Adding to the illusionary nature of Freuds experience is that he was, as Richard Armstrong reminds us, experiencing a
disturbance of memory on a much disturbed site of memory (2005:2).
The Acropolis was reconstructed as an official classical ruin after the
Greek Revolution (18211829). It had been a Turkish fortress since
1456 and had its medieval and Turkish structures gradually removed,
including the mosque which had been tucked inside the Parthenon
(Armstrong 2005:2).2
Freud himself gives his reaction an Oedipal interpretation, attributing it to guilt that he and his brother Alexander (his companion at the
Acropolis) felt for having gone further than their father:
It must be that the sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having
gone such a long way: there was something about it that was wrong, that
from earliest times had been forbidden. It was something to do with a childs
criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the
overvaluation [italic added] of earlier childhood. It seems as though the
essence of success was to have got further than ones father, and as though
to excel ones father was still something forbidden. (Schur 1972:230)

Their father, Jacob, was a Central European in a geographical sense, a

modest Jewish businessman from a Galician shtetl who knew Hebrew better than he knew German. But the sons had become centrally European
and stood that day at the primal scene of European identity (Armstrong
2005:12). The incidence of derealization (Entfremdungsgefhl) on the
Acropolis might be compared with Freuds forgetting of the name Boltraffio during his trip to the Balkans in 1898, which inspired the article
On the Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness in which he theorizes
that hysterical amnesia may be triggered in order to block a disturbing
sexual memory. The disturbance of memory on the Acropolis did not
mask a sexual memory, but, in Freuds own interpretation, profound
Oedipal guilt.
During the period of professional and personal refashioning after
his fathers death in 1896, moving from seduction to fantasy-based sexual
theory of neuroses, Freud made three journeys to the Balkans and Greece:
to Slovenia in April 1898, to Herzegovina the following September,
and to the Acropolis in September 1904. His Balkan visits of 1898 fall
under the formative period of psychoanalysis and the publication of The

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Duan I. Bjelic;

I nterpretation of Dreams (1900), which Freud associates with the finest

and probably the only lastingdiscovery that I have made (1985:353).
In traveling to the Balkans, Freud changed the outer scene, intensifying
his self-analysis and the change of the inner scene. Combining the inner
and outer worlds allowed him to form new theoretical models (Kanzer
1979:352353). As Freud moved toward his formulation of the Oedipal
complex, in his theory as well as in his actual travels, the movement was
from the Gothic north to the classic south (McGrath 1986:204).
The Balkans and Freuds conquest of the subaltern
Freuds first trip to the Balkans took place in April 1898, an Easter
trip with his brother Alexander to Italy and Slovenia. During this visit,
Freud and Alexander visited the Rudolf Cave in the Slovenian Carso.
The experience, as described by Freud, forms an apt metaphor for his
professional identity, foreshadowing his journey into incest, personal
empowerment, and professional success. The narrative also resonates with
the established colonial stereotypes that would later profoundly influence his psychoanalytic precepts and his self-fashioning as a masculine
scientist. Freud writes of the visit to the cave in a letter dated 14 April
1898 to the Berlin Physician Wilhelm Fliess:
Strangest of all was our guide, in a deep alcoholic stupor, but completely
surefooted, and full of humor. He was the discoverer of the cave, obviously
a genius gone wrong; constantly spoke of his death, his conflicts with the
priests, and his conquests in these subterranean realms. When he said that
he had already been in thirty-six holes in the Carso, I realized he was a
neurotic and his conquistador exploits were an erotic equivalent. A few
minutes later he confirmed this, because when Alex asked him how far
one could penetrate into the cave, he answered, Its like with a virgin; the
farther you get, the more beautiful it is. (1985:309)

On the surface, Freuds description is very ethnographic. He portrays

what he sees; yet a closer reading reveals it to be a classic example of the
application of colonial geography, with every detail attuned to Freuds
forbidden sexuality. Although discovering the caves is no doubt the
act of an unrecognized genius, the guides describing them as virgins
holes and the work of discovery as quasi-rape reveals to Freud the
fragile ego of the people south of the Empire and their difficulty in suppressing libidinal force. Consistent as these comments are with Freuds
own obsession at that time with death and sexual pleasure, the guide is
obsessed with death, priests, and the color black. Humorous and tipsy,
he is nonetheless surefooted. And, as Freuds description conveys, the

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31

guides brain, the organ of civilization, is flooded with libido, while the
animal, lower part of his body stands firmly on the ground.
Most unexpectedly, that afternoon in another cave, Freud was forced
to shift his subject position to look upon himself as he had looked upon
the cave guide. In this subterranean space of the European continent,
he suddenly encountered Dr. Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of
Vienna and head of the Christian Socialist Party:
The caves of Saint Cangian, which we saw in the afternoon, are a gruesome
miracle of nature, a subterranean river running through magnificent vaults,
waterfalls, stalactite formations, pitch darkness, and slippery paths secured
with iron railings. It was Tartarus itself. If Dante saw anything like this, he
needed no great effort of imagination for his inferno. At the same time the
master of Vienna, Herr Dr. Karl Lueger, was with us in the cave, which after
three and a half hours spewed us all out into the light again. (1985:309)

According to Lilian Furst, Lueger initiated a decade of all that was

anathema to liberalism: clericalism, socialism, and anti-Semitism (2001).
Freud saw him as representative of the political and anti-Semitic forces
in Vienna that were likely to oppose his pending university promotion.
In a classic case study of paranoia which has entered the psychoanalytic canon as the Rat Man, Freud brings the signifiers from the
meeting with Lueger in the cave into a productive tension. The study
appeared thirteen years after the cave incident, and that event is not at
all the explicit concern of the Rat Man study. However, in retrospect,
its conclusions are certainly applicable to both the overall psychological
structure of the Slovenian incident in 1898 and Freuds own mindset at
the time. What particularly interested Freud in the Rat Man case was
how the psychological force of the oppressive father forged the unconscious alignment between anti-Semitism and homosexuality (Freud 1955).
The father of the eponymous Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) was a respected
scientist who made a name for himself by developing machines to prevent schoolboys from masturbating. The father also strongly opposed
his sons relationship with a woman who attracted him. Prohibition of
the sons expression of sexuality had created psychological ambivalence,
forcing him into homosexual regression with regard to his father. This
was, Freud concludes, the cause of paranoia manifested as anti-Semitism
and expressed as the fear of becoming a woman (that is, a Jew). This
was a response to a compulsive hallucination of being penetrated by his
father. In Freuds explanation, the anti-Semitic stereotype becomes the
functional part of Aryan paranoia.
According to Freuds developmental scheme, homoeroticism is a
normal stage in a childs development. Yet every normal child evolves,

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Duan I. Bjelic;

through parental repression of infantile sexuality, into a heterosexual

adult. However, when the repression is too strong and strict, as in the
case of the Rat Mans father, it causes a regression into homosexuality.
The socio-political implications of Freuds conclusion in the Rat Man
study, that anti-Semitism is the result of paranoia caused by the Aryan
oppressive superego, are obvious. Jews had become the victims of this
drama and the screen upon which Aryan sexual regression was to be
projected. Jews then internalize the effects of this oppression, and men
become feminized, thus causing in turn the arrest of normal heterosexual
development. But the cave-guides heterosexual metaphor of penetrating
a virgins hole may have reminded Freud of his own Oedipal shift after
the death of his fatherfrom the negative, that is toward the father and
homosexuality, to the positive, toward the mother and heterosexuality.3
Oedipal bonding with the masculine father and the feminine mother as
the precondition for the parental repression of infantile sexuality and
successful heterosexual development was particularly important for the
health of Jews, and thus of Freud himself. It was the way of escape from
the oppression of the Aryan superego that makes Jewish fathers weak
and their sons homosexual. In February 1898, just two months before
the encounter with Lueger in the cave, Freud wrote to Fliess regarding
a dream that revealed his heterosexual incestuous desire: A rumor has
it that we are to be invested with the title of professor at the emperors
jubilee on December 2nd. I do not believe it, but had a delightful
dream about it, which unfortunately cannot be published because its
background, its second meaning, shifts back and forth between my nurse
(my mother) and my wife (1985:299).
The Interpretation of Dreams, Freuds crowning achievement up to
that point, drew upon dreams and experiences related to his travels
in the Balkans. This was the work with which he conquered not only
the academic world beyond Vienna but also the anti-Semitic political
establishment forced to accept, according to Carl E. Schorske, the fatal
power of sex and the primacy of psychoanalysis over politics (Schorske
1980:201). Freud prefaced The Interpretation of Dreams with a quote from
Vergils Aeneid: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (If I cannot
bend the Higher powers / I will move the Infernal Regions), a quote
that is revelatory of what the Balkan journey signified for him. These are
the words of Juno, who, after failing to convince Jupiter to allow Dido to
marry Aeneas, calls upon a Fury (Allecto) to unleash war against Aeneass
allies. As Schorske writes,
Vergil paints a fearsome portrait of Allectoa Gorgon-like phallic female
alive with black and writhing snakes, a bisexual monster. Freud cites Junos
words again in his text in an important place, where he wishes to point

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

33

up the overall significance of his research into dreams. After repeating

the question, he says, The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a
knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. And in a footnote
he adds: This like [the legend] is intended to picture the efforts of the
repressed instinctual impulses. (1980:201)

It was as if Freud, in echoing this proclamation of Juno, was formulating his own imaginary about the future of psychoanalysis and
framing the cave, the Infernal Regions, as the staging ground for the
psychoanalytic conquest of the anti-Semitic world. He had come to see
himself in the same way that he had perceived the cave guideas an
erotic conquistador, one who discovers the underground world by means
of conquering the way one might deflower a virgin. In a letter to Fliess
(1 February 1900) he invokes the same sexualized stereotype of the
Balkan subject to describe himself:
For I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, and
adventurer, if you want to translate this termwith all the inquisitiveness,
daring and tenacity characteristic of such a man. Such people are customarily
valued only if they have been successful, have really discovered something;
otherwise they are thrown by the wayside. (1985:398)

Here he uses the word conquistador to cast himself as an adventurer and,

given the context of the first use, an eroticized conqueror. This is significant because, according to Freuds biographer, Max Schur, the two letters
to Fliess (1898 and 1900) represent the only occurrences of the word in
all of Freuds writing. Conquistador, literally conqueror, has a very specific
denotation, that of the Spanish adventurers who discovered, explored,
and conquered the New World. Schur writes, The use of the same
term in two completely different contexts is a beautiful example of what
Freud called sublimation (albeit to different degrees)the utilization
and transformation of instinctual goals for intellectual and professional
achievements (1972:201n). Schur, however, misses an important point
in drawing this connection. Given the colonial and erotic context of the
first use of the word, Freuds second use becomes itself the context of
the identification with the same subject-position attributed to the Slovene
cave guide. The words he uses to describe the guide might well now be
applied to Freud himself: He was the discoverer of the cave, obviously a
genius gone wrong; constantly spoke of his death, his conflicts with the
priests, and his conquests in these subterranean realms (1985:398).
Schur elaborates further on Freuds use of the term conquistador:
When Freud referred to himself as a conquistador, he had in mind such
men as Cortez who, with a handful of men, had conquered empires. Freud

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Duan I. Bjelic;

had conquered the problem of the dream virtually alone, except for the
help of his friend and adopted analyst (1972:203). Freuds identification with Cortez stands in sharp contrast with young doctor Freud who
enthusiastically embraced coca leaves and their alkaloid cocaine as an
erotic elixir of the South American colonial subject and promoted it as
a panacea (Freud 1974). The conquistador, the adventurer in search of
gold, had unintentionally opened Europe to the Indian subaltern and its
natural chemistry of coca leaves. The erotic emphasis was on the substance
not on the conquest. Given that he related to alkaloid cocaine instinctively and had focused his mental capacity to promote and universalize
the cocaine experience as a medical gift in light of his later self-analysis
and theory of Eastern maleness, Freud would have to characterize this
bond as an attraction of two neurotic cultures, the primitive and the
Jewish. Disentangling conquistador from cocaine signals the shift
in Freuds relation to his Eastern identity and his experience of it as
the dark continent. Freud replaces the submissive psychology of the
Eastern male with the psychology of the conquest. His conquest, however, has a reverse trajectory from that of Cortez. It proceeds from the
underworld to science and civilization, from the erotics of a substance
to the erotics of conquest.
Freuds first contact with the underworld came in his youth when
he enthusiastically embraced cocaine and praised the chemistry of coca
leaves as a miracle cure for modern neurosis. The first dream that Freud
analyzed in detail, the famous Irma dream, occurred under the influence of cocaine in the summer of 1895 while visiting Bellevue:
I began to guess why the formula for trimethylamin had been so prominent in the dream. So many important subjects converged upon that one
word. Trimethylamin was an allusion not only to the immensely powerful
factor of sexuality, but also to a person whose agreement I recalled with
satisfaction whenever I felt isolated in my opinions. Surely this friend who
played so large a part in my life must appear again elsewhere in these trains
of thought. Yes. For he had a special knowledge of the consequences of
affections of the nose and its accessory cavities; and he had drawn scientific
attention to some very remarkable connections between the turbinal bones
and the female organs of sex. (1974:217)

In Freuds dream, Trimethylamin works as a chemical allusion to the homoerotic bond with his Berlin friend Wilhelm Fliess, who had introduced
Freud to the chemical theory of sexuality. As in his theory, Freuds dream
fuses sexuality and chemistry. In this instance, Freuds cocaine wish
becomes an organizing principle for analyzing the manifest and latent
content of the dream. The experience of intoxication is the moment in
which a substance (cocaine) derived from the product of an external

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

35

subaltern activates the pathological psychology of the subjects internal

subaltern (the unconscious). Freuds correspondence with Fliess richly
documents his experience with the substance out of which he eventually
extracted his sexual intoxication theory as a model for explaining hysteria.
As Freud was conceptualizing instinct more and more in terms of the
colonial paradigm of primitivity, the colonial subaltern was conflated with
the unconscious that must be under psychoanalytic supervision.
To understand this shift, we must attend to the role of Freuds
relationship to the Balkans in the development of psychoanalysis. The
Balkans, for Freud, figured as the space of forbidden desire where he
could confront his personal trauma of the East, encountered in antiSemitic Vienna, and intensify self-analysis. Freuds mindset on the way to
the Balkans productively engaged the contradictions of his Jewish identity
with which he struggled in the anti-Semitic world and placed him on the
path that led to his later articulation of the individual unconscious, of
infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. As Gil Anidjar points out,
encountering and identifying with the subject position of the Bosnian
Turk in Herzegovina allowed Freud to see himself as European, the
Turks Other (2003:136). In this liminal space of intersubjectivity, Freud
was able to begin mapping the unconscious and also the supervising
authority of psychoanalysis.
Yet, in many respects, the visit to Herzegovina remains discursively
and biographically controversial. Soon after his return from the trip,
Freud published a short but contentious paper entitled The Psychic
Mechanism of Forgetfulness in Monatschrift fr Psychiatrie und Neurologie.
The paper, which describes an event that took place during his trip to
Herzegovina, was the first of a series of articles on his self-analysis and the
articulation of the unconscious. The article concerns Freuds forgetting
the proper name of an Italian painter, Luca Signorelli, while conversing
with a Berlin lawyer in a carriage traveling from Ragus (Dubrovnik) to
Trebinje in Herzegovina. After finishing a conversation about various
peculiarities of the Turks living there and their relation to sex and
death, Freud wanted to talk about Italian painters. Suddenly, he reports,
he could not remember the name Signorelli, which he certainly knew
as that of the Renaissance Italian artist who had painted the fresco cycle
Apocalypse and the Last Judgment in the Cathedral at Orvieto, as well
as other famous works. Yet the names Botticelli and Boltraffio kept
coming to mind in place of Signorelli. Reflecting upon this event
of the summer, in the context of his standing preoccupation with the
sexual etiology of neurosis, Freud theorized that his forgetting the name
was the result of the unconscious mechanism of sexual repression. He
speculates that a piece of disturbing news that had reached him from

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Trafoi, Italy, right before the trip to Trebinje, about the suicide of a
patient on account of an incurable sexual complaint had interfered
with his memory (1962:294). The fact that he could not remember the
name Signorelli, Freud claims, meant that he was suppressing a disturbing memory of this patient, presumably guilt at not being able to
avert the patients suicide. Freuds unconscious had attached a sexual
content, which concealed itself through forgetting the name Signorelli.
Freud then goes on to unpack the connections between the names of
the painters, the tragic suicide of his patient, and his trip to Trebinje.
He gives the following account:
Shortly before I had come to the subject of the frescoes in the cathedral
at Orvieto, I had been telling my traveler-companion something I had
heard from my colleague years ago about the Turks in Bosnia. They treat
doctors with special respect and they show, in marked contrast to our own
people, an attitude of resignation towards the dispensations of fate. If the
doctor has to inform the father of a family that one of his relatives is about
to die, his reply is: Herr [Sir], what is there to be said? I know that if he
could be saved, then you would help him. Another recollection lay in my
memory close to this story. The same colleague had told me what overriding importance these Bosnians attached to sexual enjoyments. One of
his patients said to him once: Herr, you must know, that if that comes to
an end then life is of no value. At the time, it seemed to the doctor and
me that the two character-traits of the Bosnian people illustrated by this
could be assumed to be intimately connected with each other. But when I
remembered these stories on my drive into Herzegovina, I suppressed the
second one, in which the subject of sexuality was touched on. It was soon
after this that the name Signorelli escaped me and that the names Botticelli
and Boltraffio appeared as substituents (1962:292).

He had formed an unconscious association between the names of the

Italian painters and the Bosnians valuing of sexual enjoyment over
life. The connection between Signorelli and Herzegovina, he reasons, is
in Signor and Her[r] both having the same meaning, Sir. Furthermore,
as Freud recounts to his traveling companion, the Bosnian patient twice
addressed the doctor as Herr, once when he spoke about death and
once about sexual enjoyment. The translation of Signor into Herr was
therefore the key to Freuds forgetting the name Signorelli. But why
would the names of two other painters occur to him? Again, Bo-tticelli and
Bo-ltraffio begin with the same two letters as Bo-snian. But it is the name
Boltraffio that had called for a further determination. The disturbing
information about the suicide, Freud points out, is derived from Trafoi,
a word which sounds like traffio. Here is Freuds structural formula of
this chemistry of words (Figure 1).

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37

Figure 1. Freuds structural formula for his chemistry of words.

Freud uses this case as definite proof of repression caused by forbidden desire, and he hoped to further develop his theory of the sexual
origin of neurosis on the basis of it (Freud S.E. III 1953:294). In hysterical
amnesia, he postulates, the unconscious has blocked a disturbing sexual
memory, and concludes his short paper by stating that psychoanalysis is
able to cure amnesia by bringing this sort of blocked memory into the
ego-consciousness.
When the paper was published, it met with some skepticism. Most
disturbing to Freud was the criticism from his colleague and personal
confidant in sexual matters, Josef Breuer. Freud had sought treatment
from Breuer for the cardiac condition he believed to have been caused
by enforced sexual abstinence because he did not want to have more kids.
In Freuds account of the incident in the carriage, Breuer noticed obvious
gaps in the narration (Swales 2003:33). So when Freud comments in a
footnote to his article that Herz forms part of the name Herzegovina,
and the heart itself, as a sick bodily organ, played a part in the thoughts
I have described as having been repressed (1962:296), to Breuer, with
his knowledge of Freuds physical and psychological conditions, the line
of signification from Herzegovina to Her(z) (Heart) points only to Herr
Doctor Freuds heart. For Breuer, Freuds use of Herzegovina transfers
Turkish geopolitical illness to himself to reveal that Freud was the sick
man in this story.4 Breuer had stumbled unintentionally upon an important aspect of Freuds self-analysis of his treatment of his unconscious as
Europes geopolitical landscape.
Breuers suspicion brings into question the reality of Freuds

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Duan I. Bjelic;

account. Others have questioned it as well. According to Swales, the

events described in the article are completely fictional, a product of
Freuds obsessive neurosis. Freuds itinerary of that summer, which
Swales closely analyzes, his limited knowledge of Italian painters at that
time, and his mindset, lead the historian to conclude that Freud most
likely could not have known of the painter Boltraffio (a minor figure in
Italian art) at that time. Swales further argues that Freud probably did
not encounter the name Boltraffio until a week or so after his visit to
Trebinjein Milan where Freud traveled right after the Balkans. It was
listed in Morellis guide to Italian painters which he had purchased on
that occasion. Freud could also have seen Boltraffios work in Morellis
gallery in Bergamo, which he visited the next day. In fact, Freud could
have seen in this gallery not only Boltraffios work, but that of Signorelli
and Botticelli as well, placed next to each other on the wall in the same
order that they appear in his story: #20 (Signorelli), #21 (Botticelli), and
#22 (Boltraffio). According to Freud, he could not remember the first
in the series and he recollects the other two in the order of the display
of their works in the gallery. He could not have seen these painters in
that order before his trip to Trebinje because there is only evidence of
a visit to this gallery after his trip to Herzegovina, not before. If he did not
know of Boltraffio before his visit to Trebinje, then he could not have
remembered the name in the first place. This renders his account of the
discovery of the unconscious mechanism of forgetting a pure fiction.5
Breuers suspicion seemed to have an unintended point: what happened
to Freud in the Balkans, the place of Freuds projected fantasies and
unleashed desire, really happened as long as he said so.
The painting in question by Luca Signorelli in the Galleria Morelli
was Madonna col Bambino. The painting portrays the Madonna holding the
naked infant Jesus in her left arm while touching his penis with her right
thumb. The image must have triggered in Freud a host of psychopolitical
associations, one of which returned him always back to the East as the
place of trauma. The painting reminded him of his Czech nurse, who
was an uneducated peasant woman and a devout Catholic who, according
to Freud, had sexualized him at an early age (perhaps stimulating his
penis as the Madonna did to the baby Jesus) (Krull 1978:120).6 Clearly,
his early sexual awakening was associated with Eastern Europe. It is as
if he became the victim of the Easts incestuous practices. In Morellis
gallery, Signorellis Catholic imaginary stood in unfamiliar contrast to
his Turkish imaginary as it surfaced in Herzegovina. On the one hand,
Signorellis Catholic imaginary reminded Freud of the anti-Semitic
authority of the Catholic Church, which held Jews to be incestuous.
(Did not his Catholic nurse commit incest with him, the Jewish boy?)

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

39

On the other hand, displayed in this image is incest itself, fantasized by

a Catholic painter yet projected upon Jews. Here Freud encounters his
place of trauma as well as the insight which would lead to his recovery.
Reflecting the geopolitical context of Europe in relation to its
political Other, Freud saw clearly his trauma of incest as a Catholic
neurosis projected upon and internalized by him, the Jew. The imposed
trauma would become a force to be transformed into psychoanalysis. We
see this transformative route foreshadowed in the Muslim dream of the
momentous summer of 1898 on which Freud dwells in The Interpretation
of Dreams (Grinstein 1968:193). This dream, as Alexander Grinsteins
analysis confirms, involved forbidden objects of an incestuous character
(193). It synthesizes sexual desire with symbolism evoked by people and
places Freud encountered in Dalmatia and Herzegovina and, he declares,
it is a dream of wish-fulfillment triggered by hunger. According to the
dream, he had returned to an empty house and went to sleep hungry. In
the fall of 1898, upon his return from Italy, Freud returned to an empty
home. His wife and children were away. Tired and hungry, he fell asleep
and dreamed about an inn-kitchen, where he encounters three matronly
women, one of whom is pretending to make dumplings, Freuds favorite
food. He asks her for food and she tells him to wait, a response he often
heard from his nurse as a child. The dream proceeds:
I felt impatient and went off with a sense of injury. I put on an overcoat. But
the first I tried on was too long for me. I took it off, rather surprised to find
it was trimmed with fur. A second one that I put on had a long strip with a
Turkish design let into it. A stranger with a long face and a short pointed
beard came up and tried to prevent my putting it on, saying it was his. I
showed him then that it was embroidered all over with a Turkish pattern.
He asked: What have the Turkish (design, strips ...) to do with you? But
we then became quite friendly with each other. (1953:204)

The woman in the dream who tells him to wait symbolizes his mother
and his nurse; relief of hunger and pleasure both come, Freud stresses,
from the same place: the breast. Here we see how Freud connects his
mother with his nurse and how he projects his sexual desire for his mother
upon the nursemaid who bares the sign of the East. Freud remembers
that he was told once by a young man about a good-looking wet-nurse
who had suckled him when he was a baby. Im sorry, he remarked, that
I didnt make better use of my opportunity (1953:204). This touched
upon Freuds own childhood fantasies about his nurse, personified by the
woman in his dream. The sense of lost opportunity struck Freud again
when shopping in Cattaro (Kotor, a coastal town in Montenegro) after
his journey to Trebinje. Hesitating to buy an article he wanted, he had

40

Duan I. Bjelic;

lost an opportunity of making some nice acquisition, which caused a

subconscious resurgence of regret for the neglected opportunity with
the wet-nurse (1953:207). He compares the neurosis caused by his desire
for his nurse with madness in relation to the three women in the innkitchen. They remind him of a novel whose title he does not remember;
he does, however, vividly remember its ending. The hero went mad
and kept calling out the names of the three women who had brought
the greatest happiness and sorrow into his life (1953:207). Unfulfilled
sexual hunger had caused the heros madness. To end the madness,
Freud would have to take the opportunity of satisfying sexual desire,
even though it might be wrong to do so and was prohibited.
The geopolitical contradictions placing Freud in the position of
Europes Other opened the path to psychological recovery from the
neurosis imposed by Christian authority. Rescue from the madness caused
by the lingering desire for the Catholic nurse comes to Freud from the
Bosnian Turk. A stranger with a long face and a short pointed beard
who reminded him of his wifes purchase a couple of days earlier in Spalato (Split) of some Turkish stuff for the relief of her constipation that,
for some reason, had for Freud an erotic and humorous meaning. The
name of the shopkeeper was Popovic, a name Freud associated with the
German nursery word Popo, bottom. The bottom-man is the bearded
man in Freuds dream, who seems to represent both the father and a
Bosnian Turk and who prohibits his incestuous pleasure by preventing him from putting on the Turkish overcoat and redirecting him to
homoerotic desire toward the father. Considering that overcoat signified condom in Freuds analysis, and Bosnian Turk signified desired
sexual despotism, this dream translates into the wishful transfer of the
Turkish sexual character into himself (1953:186). The shopkeeper is the
Bosnian Turk that he wants to be in order to take advantage of his
wet-nurse. Muslim here coincides with the Jew, again now regressing
into anal (Popo) eroticism. Freud repressed the latter as a way of fashioning himself in opposition to what he perceived as failing East European
masculinity; in the dream the Turkish father prohibits and thus stimulates desire for the nurse. Thus the father figure in the dream appears
in two guises, revealing the ambivalence of Freuds sexuality: once as a
Jewish weak father, toward whom the dreamer has homoerotic desire, and
once as a Turkish father who prohibits and intensifies his desire for the
nurse. Now a father figure, the shopkeeper Popovic asks, puzzled, What
have the Turkish (designs, stripes ...) got to do with you? Freud then
becomes friendly, marking the shift to homosexual desire for the father.
Freuds unconscious registers Popovic as a Turk; he is the initial owner
of the Turkish overcoat (condom) and with it Freud enters the Turkish

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

41

erotic zone of the father. Freud feels as if he is putting on something

that does not yet belong to him, but rather to the Turkish character and
the sexual despot, the father. The real Freud is transformed into the
dream Popovic as a stereotypical Turk.
De-centering Freuds geography
Freuds visit to Trebinje, a small town in Herzegovina, the Southern
Austrian colony, in September 1898, was in many respects a benchmark
in the development of his professional identity. What he encountered
there became significant for the intellectual success of psychoanalysis. The
Christian uprising in Herzegovina against the Ottomans in 18761878 had
forced the Ottomans to retreat from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the
Berlin Congress had delegated authority over Bosnia and Herzegovina
to the Dual Monarchy. The Southern Slavs hate of the Ottomans and
stories about Christian-Muslim bloodshed still permeated the atmosphere
in Trebinje when Freud arrived. Although marginal geographically, Herzegovina signified the beginning of what was to become the Eastern Question for the European empires competing for influence in the region.
For the Balkans and Turks, it signified the beginning of a movement
toward national liberation and the building of nation-states. It was also
a harbinger of future Balkan wars. It is possible that Freuds interest in
observing the Bosnian Turks firsthand (and his desire to Orientalize his
imaginary) was aroused by accounts of the Bosnian Turks sent to him by
his distant relative Alois Pick, a physician based in the Austrian garrison
in Herzegovina. He never reported on his actual visit to Trebinje and
what he encountered there, and it is not clear what Freuds trip actually consisted of, and how, precisely, he planned to observe the Turks
sexuality. After the Herzegovina uprising, the place had been virtually
cleansed of Ottomans. What remained was their traces in the indigenous
population in the form of religion (Islam) and architecture.
We do know from Rebecca Wests description of her visit to Trebinje
in 1937 that, in addition to mosques, the town had an old harem that had
become a tourist attraction (1969:276277). After the visit, her husband
commented that the place was like a brothel with the sexual intercourse
left out (Swales 2003:62n). Swales invites the reader to imagine Freud
entering this space, 40 years before Wests visit. Given the timing, his
desire for his sister-in-law Minna, his sexual neurosis at that time, and his
exaggerated interest in the sexual life of the Turks, the harem might well
have had an aphrodisiacal effect on him. Thinking about the previous
owners as connoisseurs of feminine beauty, and addicted to all sorts of
erotic experiencethe image quite consistent with the Turks as an

42

Duan I. Bjelic;

Figure 2. Trebinje.

object of great envy in being heirs to an exotic Islamic tradition that

found nothing deprived or shameful in polygamyor, for that matter, in
sexual slaveryFreud had embarked upon the trip to Herzegovina and
Trebinje to see himself surrounded with the elixir of Turkish sexuality
(Swales 2003:62n). The intoxicating fusion of the evocative surroundings
with his own recent experiences caused him to remove the boundaries of
his own libidoto feel, for a short time, like a Turk. In other words, he
eroticized himself through self-orientalization and opened his language
to the unforgettable discoveries of his own sexual fantasy.
Peter Swales speculates that there was a very personal component
to Freuds interest in the sexuality of the Bosnian Turks and his subsequent trip to the Austrian subaltern territory. He harbored sexual
fantasies about his youngest sister-in-law Minna, who lived with Freuds
family as a nurse to his children, and with whom he had traveled alone
for a few weeks before his trip to Trebinje. Recent historical findings
indicate that Freud and Minna consummated their relationship, a fact
which Jung claimed many years later to have learned from Minna herself.
This scenario allows for the possibility that Freuds putative fantasy in
the midst of the old seraglio points to another primitive aspect of the
East in Freud: the archaic father. Formulated many years later in his
Totem and Taboo, this figure, as the sexual despot of the primal horde,
claimed all women for himself (Blumenthal 2006).

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

43

In The Sultans Court: European Fantasies of the East, French Lacanian

Alain Grosrichard accounts for the ways in which the Ottomans conjured
up European Orientalist fantasies of political and sexual despotism that
worked as constructive illusions for the ideological operation of absolute
monarchy. The image of the Grand Turk mirrored the reality of the
enlightened European, and the seraglio, the place of death and sex,
became the focal point of Orientalist fantasies in the European courts.
These fantasies inspired questions fundamental to the progress of the
European Enlightenment, such as questions about principles of its
political institutions, the goals of education, the role of family, and the
enigma of relations between the sexesall questions in which its essential
metaphysics is engaged, more deeply than it appears to be (Grosrichard
1998:125126). Freud, the enlightened European, standing in Trebinjes
abandoned harem, must have found that the seraglio which was produced at the beginning of the seventeenth century probably coincides
exactly with what is expected (Grosrichard 1998:125). In the context of
Swaless hypothesization of Freuds Orientalist fantasy, the very place of
Herzegovinas subaltern fractures and displaces Freud. As if on a flying
carpet, he journeys back and forth between Berggasse 19 and Trebinje.
The journey is flooded with images of naked white slaves helpless before
the despot mingling with those of his patients (mostly women), lying upon
the Bosnian diwan in his office, surrendering their secrets and ready to
be analyzed by the Doctor himself as a kind of epistemological coitus.
In the midst of this Orientalist illusion, Freud had seen, as his dreams
reveal, the face of the primal father.
To understand this shift, we must attend to the role of Freuds relationship to the Balkans in the development of psychoanalysis. The Balkans,
for Freud, figured as the space of forbidden desire, the place where he
could confront the personal trauma of the East he encountered in antiSemitic Vienna and intensify self-analysis. Freuds mindset on the way to
the Balkans productively engaged the contradictions of his Jewish identity,
with which he struggled in the anti-Semitic world, and placed him on
the path which led to his later articulation of the individual unconscious,
of infantile sexuality, and the negative Oedipus complex. Encountering
and identifying with the subject position of the Bosnian Turk in Herzegovina, Gil Anidjar points out that Freud encounters the ghost of the
unitary way of life, the indivisible One, prior to the Christian splitting of
it on its internal ( Jews) and external (Muslim) enemies. This encounter,
Anidjar argues, allows Freud to see the interchangability of the Christian
Other between the Jew and the Muslim (2003:137). In this liminal space
of intersubjectivity, friend-enemy Freud was able to begin mapping the
unconscious and also the supervising authority of psychoanalysis.

44

Duan I. Bjelic;

When Freud climbed the Acropolis in 1904, he had already

moved the underworld by mapping the unconscious. His travels in
the Balkans played a significant role in that process as well as in his own
self-fashioning as an Aryan doctor. What he could not foresee, emerging from the cave after the portentous encounter with the real monster
Karl Lueger, was how the ingrained geopolitical and self-orientalizing
structure of psychoanalysis would combine dangerously with the Balkans
own propensity for self-orientalization a century later. The coincidence
of Freuds discovery of the Oedipal complex with his Balkan journey
marked by the peak of his sexual neuroses, accentuated by the fear that
he may not be promoted into a University position if his affair with
his sister-in-law became known and revealed him to the anti-Semitic
public as an incestuous Jewlinks his crypto-colonial experience on
the Acropolis to his self-orientalization as foundational of his theory of
Oedipal conflict (Herzfeld 2002). If Felix Guattari is correct in claiming that Freudianism was a process designed to cure Freud, then by
turning Oedipus into an Aryan Greek and offering him as the universal
standard of psychic normality Freud did not abandon Aryan ideologi-

Figure 3. Freuds famous couch covered with the oriental rug send to him as a gift from Thessaloniki by his distant relative and a local merchant Moritz Freud in 1886.

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

45

cal fantasy after the Acropolis visit (Guattari 2006:89). He in fact used
it as the cure against the very pathological substance that surfaced in
his Balkan dreams. In this regard we may claim that the subject Balkans,
consisting of its intelligible multitude of material details, situations, and
embedded perspectives so fortuitous to Freuds self-analysisthe Thessalonica rug, the broken marbles, a Turkish harem and Slovene cave,
and the splendor of the Acropolis (not excluding lies and dreams)all
in their different ways and timings led to the same effect, splitting Freud
on European and non-European. In short, we learn that Freud had discovered in the Balkans Orientalism before Said, except that he, unlike
Said who turned it against its cause, had turned it against himself until
it was too late to change it.
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

NOTES
1
Sander L. Gilman has summarized Freuds dilemma well: How could he both be at
risk for certain diseases, especially specific forms of psychopathology, and simultaneously
study and treat these illnesses? How could he (and here gender is important) be both the
neutral scientist-physician demanded by fin de sicle assumptions about the positivistic
nature of science and the individual at risk? (1993:34). German and Austrian Jews, well
integrated into the middle class of their societies, had adopted the Enlightenment as their
worldview, and looked upon Eastern European Jews, Ostjuden, who lived in ghettos and
maintained a traditional way of life, as a threat to their own secular European identity.
Therefore, educated Jews of Central Europe commonly viewed East European Jews as
culturally inferior, medically degenerate, sexually obsessed, and feminized. See Steven E.
Aschheim (1982:5), Stephen Frosh (2005), and Daniel Boyarin (1977:220).
2
Maria Koundoura (2007) takes a somewhat more radical position on Freuds visit to
the Acropolis. She focuses on Freuds realization of the Hellenic beast splitting him in
two, to map and discuss this responses representation in the discourse on modernity at
large and that of Greece in particular. A critique of the long-held Eurocentric premise that
Greece is a stable place where one discovers oneself, she argues, if it originates from the
stable place of a particular and dominant national historical context, can re-introduce the
ideology it aims to displace. She argues for a transnational, multiply-located examination
of the location of Greece in the European imaginary, something that my own thesis that
Freud had discovered Orientalism on the Acropolis attempts to do.
3
Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold,
positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children: that is
to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice toward his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and

46

Duan I. Bjelic;

displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and
hostility towards his mother (Freud [S.E. XIX] 1953:33). All references to Freuds 1953
twenty-four volume Standard Edition will be abbreviated S.E. from here on.
4
What was Freud not telling his readers? What did his patient, Signorellis painting,
and Trebinje have erotically in common with death and with him? The paper leads one
to conclude that Freud could not remember the second character trait of the local Turks,
the love of sex more than life and that this suppressed information somehow had also
consigned the name Signorelli to temporary oblivion because of his own thoughts on
death and sexual pleasure intimately bound up with trains of thought which were in a state
of repression in me (1962:293). At this point the reader does not know the intimate cause
working in Freuds memory blocking the proper name. Three year later in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud revisits the event and offers the clarification with a bit
of revision. Now, as Swales warns, Freud shifts the cause of the lost memory from him to
somebody else. The cause now is not intimate and personal to Freud, as it was in the first
account, so much so that he could not tell the reader what it was. He divulges that it was
a piece of news that he had received when stopping in Trafoi about his deceased patient.
On this occasion, Freud writes, I was still under the influence of a piece of news which
had reached me a few weeks before while I was making a brief stay at Trafoi. A patient
over whom I had taken a great deal of trouble had put an end to his life on account of
an incurable sexual disorder (1960:3). If that was the reason, why not reveal it in the first
essay? In the letters to Fliess, Freud stated that he had skirted the sexual involving his
sexual life, thus suggesting that the reason to skirt the cause in the first essay was involving his sexual life (Swales 2003:34). The second does not sound so dramatically personal
and sexual. Doctors deal with the death of their patients all the time, what is so personal
in this case? What makes Freuds account even more suspicious is the fact that there is no
record to be found of the death of his patient (Swales 2003: 58). In between the first and
the second essays Freuds account rests on his fear of Breurs suspicion. In the letter to
Fliess dated 1 August 1899, Freud laments, Of Br(euer) I have heard again that, regarding my last work (Forgetting), he expressed himself saying he is not surprised that no-one
takes my piece seriously if I am to leave such gaps (Swales 2003:31).
5
It would not be the first time that Freud had dissimulated in this manner. He
occasionally reported potentially controversial things that happened to him as if they had
happened to somebody else (usually a stranger) and sometimes would write an outright
lie (Bernfeld 1947:16); (Swales 1982:8). Swales reveals the cause of Freuds secrecy as the
sexual fantasy he had developed that summer about his youngest sister-in-law. We do know
that Freud abruptly left Minna Bernays after she traveled with him alone (for the first but
not the last time) that summer through Northern Italy, and that he was on his way to join
his wife for the journey to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and then to Trebinje. After examining
historical evidence and comparing it with Freuds own account, Swales makes a strong
case that Freud had more than just intense Oedipal fantasies about his sister-in-law. Two
years later, in the summer of 1900, according to Swaless research, Freud consummated
the relationship, leaving Minna pregnant in Merano to have an abortion at his expense
(1982:12). The disturbing news mentioned in The Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness
must have been an elliptical reference to Freuds thoughts about Minna and the possible
implications for his professional life should they ever become known. He again became
aware of this in Morellis Gallery in Bergamo. And, on the train from Lombardy to his
home in Vienna, all of these events were melded into a coherent story about a forgetting
that never happened (Swales 1982:38).
6
As he wrote to Fliess on October 3 1897, his Czech nurse was the primal originator
of his sexual identity (1985:268). It was she, not his father or his mother, who is at the
bottom of his obsessive neurosis and to whom he is thankful for providing him at such an

Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud

47

early age with means for living and going on living (230231). All of these components of
Freuds childhood memory had, at the moment of viewing Signorellis painting, merged
with his obsession with his nurse and with Minna. Kenneth A. Grigg traces the origin
of the Oedipal fantasies about Freuds nurse (later projected onto Minna) to his childhood and believes these fantasies were the primal cause of Freuds obsessional neurosis.
Freud associated the image of the Madonna with a nursemaid when he viewed Raphaels
Madonna in Dresden in 1883, but he also, according to Grigg, associated his nurse with
his mother. As a child, Freud paired in his imagination his nursemaid, an older woman,
with his older father, and his young mother with his older half-brother Philip, who was the
same age as his mother. Thus Freud projected the qualities of his young mother onto his
older nurse and fantasized that she was a young virgin whom he wished to deflower. He
makes this transparent in his Screen Memories and The Botanical Monograph with its
motif of picking yellow flowers that associates the cocaine alkaloid (a yellow powder) with
infantile fantasies about deflowering a virgin nurse. In retrospect, the parallel between
Freuds and the Slovene cave guides neuroses becomes more clear and paradigmatic for
his professional self-fashioning (Grigg 1973).

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