Freud - Complete Works (478 page)

   Lloyd remarks in the first place
that the usual descriptions of the figure are incorrect, and that
Moses is not in the act of rising¹ - that the right hand is
not grasping the beard, but that the index-finger alone is resting
upon it.² Lloyd also recognizes, and this is much more
important, that the attitude portrayed can only be explained by
postulating a foregoing one, which is not represented, and that the
drawing of the left lock of the beard across to the right signifies
that the right hand and the left side of the beard have at a
previous stage been in closer and more natural contact. But he
suggests another way of reconstructing the earlier contact which
must necessarily be assumed. According to him, it was not the hand
which had been plunged into the beard, but the beard which had been
where the hand now is. We must, he says, imagine that just before
the sudden interruption the head of the statue was turned far round
to its right over the hand which, then as now, was holding the
Tables of the Law. The pressure (of the Tables) against the palm of
the hand caused the fingers to open naturally beneath the flowing
locks of the beard, and the sudden turn of the head to the other
side resulted in a part of the beard being detained for an instant
by the motionless hand and forming the loop of hair which is to be
looked on as a mark of the course it has taken - its
‘wake’, to use Lloyd’s own word.

  
¹
‘But he is not rising or preparing to
rise; the bust is fully upright, not thrown forward for the
alteration of balance preparatory for such a
movement. . . .’ (LIoyd, 1863, 10).

  
²
‘Such a description is altogether
erroneous; the fillets of the beard are detained by the right hand
but they are not held, nor grasped, enclosed or taken hold of. They
are even detained but momentarily - momentarily engaged, they are
on the point of being free for disengagement’ (ibid.,
11).

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2866

   In rejecting the other
possibility, that of the right hand having previously been in
contact with the left side of the beard, Lloyd has allowed himself
to be influenced by a consideration which shows how near he came to
our interpretation. He says that it was not possible for the
prophet, even in very great agitation, to have put out his hand to
draw his beard across to the right. For in that case his fingers
would have been in an entirely different position; and, moreover,
such a movement would have allowed the Tables to slip down, since
they are only supported by the pressure of the right arm - unless,
in Moses’ endeavour to save them at the last moment, we think
of them as being ‘clutched by a gesture so awkward that to
imagine it is profanation’.

   It is easy to see what the writer
has overlooked. He has correctly interpreted the anomalies of the
beard as indicating a preceding movement, but he has omitted to
apply the same explanation to the no less unnatural details in the
position of the Tables. He examines only the data connected with
the beard and not those connected with the Tables, whose position
he assumes to be the original one. In this way he closes the door
to a conception like ours which, by examining certain insignificant
details, has arrived at an unexpected interpretation of the meaning
and aim of the figure as a whole.

   But what if both of us have
strayed on to a wrong path? What if we have taken too serious and
profound a view of details which were nothing to the artist,
details which he had introduced quite arbitrarily or for some
purely formal reasons with no hidden intention behind? What if we
have shared the fate of so many interpreters who have thought they
saw quite clearly things which the artist did not intend either
consciously or unconsciously? I cannot tell. I cannot say whether
it is reasonable to credit Michelangelo - an artist in whose works
there is so much thought striving for expression - with such an
elementary want of precision, and especially whether this can be
assumed in regard to the striking and singular features of the
statue under discussion. And finally we may be allowed to point
out, in all modesty, that the artist is no less responsible than
his interpreters for the obscurity which surrounds his work. In his
creations Michelangelo has often enough gone to the utmost limit of
what is expressible in art; and perhaps in his statue of Moses he
has not completely succeeded, if his purpose was to make the
passage of a violent gust of passion visible in the signs left
behind it in the ensuing calm.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2867

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2868

POSTSCRIPT

(1927)

   Several years after the
publication of my paper on the Moses of Michelangelo, which
appeared anonymously in
Imago
in 1914, Dr. Ernest Jones very
kindly sent me a copy of the April number of the
Burlington
Magazine
of 1921 (Vol. XXXVIII), which could not fail to turn
my interest once more to the interpretation of the statue which I
had originally suggested. This number contains (pp. 157-66) a short
article by H. P. Mitchell on two bronzes of the twelfth century,
now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are attributed to an
outstanding artist of that day, Nicholas of Verdun. We possess
other works by the same hand in Tournay, Arras and Klosterneuburg,
near Vienna; his masterpiece is considered to be the Shrine of the
Three Kings in Cologne.

   One of the two statuettes
described by Mitchell, which is just over 9 inches high, is
identifiable beyond all doubt as a Moses, because of the two Tables
of the Law which he holds in his hand. This Moses, too, is
represented as seated, enveloped in a flowing robe. His face is
expressive of strong passion, mixed, perhaps, with grief; and his
hand grasps his long beard and presses its strands between palm and
thumb as in a vice. He is, that is to say, making the very gesture
which I postulated in Fig. 2 of my former paper as a preliminary
stage of the attitude into which Michelangelo has cast him.

   A glance at the accompanying
illustration will show the main difference between the two
compositions, which are separated from each other by an interval of
more than three centuries. The Moses of the Lorraine artist is
holding the Tables by their top edge with his left hand, resting
them on his knee. If we were to transfer them to the other side of
his body and put them under his right arm we should have
established the preliminary posture of Michelangelo’s Moses.
If my view of the thrusting of the hand into the beard is right,
then the Moses of the year 1180 shows us an instant during his
storm of feeling, whilst the statue in S. Pietro in Vincoli depicts
the calm when the storm is over.

   In my opinion this new piece of
evidence increases the probability that the interpretation which I
attempted in 1914 was a correct one. Perhaps some connoisseur of
art will be able to bridge the gulf in time between the Moses of
Nicholas of Verdun and the Moses of the Master of the Italian
Renaissance by telling us where examples of representations of
Moses belonging to the intervening period are to be found.

2869

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOLOGY

(1914)

2870

Intentionally left blank

2871

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOLOGY

It gives you a queer feeling if, late in life,
you are ordered once again to write a school essay. But you obey
automatically, like the old soldier who, at the word
‘Attention!’, cannot help dropping whatever he may have
in his hands and who finds his little fingers pressed along the
seams of his trousers. It is strange how readily you obey the
orders, as though nothing in particular had happened in the last
half-century. But in fact you have grown old in the interval, you
are on the eve of your sixtieth birthday, and your physical
feelings, as well as your mirror, show unmistakably how far your
life’s candle is burnt down.

   As little as ten years ago,
perhaps, you may have had moments at which you suddenly felt quite
young again. As you walked through the streets of Vienna - already
a grey-beard, and weighed down by all the cares of family life -
you might come unexpectedly on some well-preserved, elderly
gentleman and would greet him humbly almost, because you had
recognized him as one of your former schoolmasters. But afterwards
you would stop and reflect: ‘Was that really he? or only some
one deceptively like him? How youthful he looks! And how old you
yourself have grown! How old can he be to-day? Can it be possible
that the men who used to stand for us as types of adulthood were
really so little older than we were?’

   At such moments as these, I used
to find, the present time seemed to sink into obscurity and the
years between ten and eighteen would rise from the corners of my
memory, with all their guesses and illusions, their painful
distortions and heartening successes - my first glimpses of an
extinct civilization (which in my case was to bring me as much
consolation as anything else in the struggles of life), my first
contacts with the sciences, among which it seemed open to me to
choose to which of them I should dedicate what were no doubt my
inestimable services. And I seem to remember that through the whole
of this time there ran a premonition of a task ahead, till it found
open expression in my school-leaving essay as a wish that I might
during the course of my life contribute something to our human
knowledge.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2872

   Later I became a physician - or a
psychologist, rather - and was able to create a new psychological
discipline, something that is known as
‘psycho-analysis’, which is followed to-day with
excited interest, and is greeted with praise and blame, by
physicians and enquirers in neighbouring, and in distant, foreign
lands - but least of all, of course, in our own country.

   As a psycho-analyst I am bound to
be concerned more with emotional than intellectual processes, with
unconscious than with conscious mental life. My emotion at meeting
my old schoolmaster warns me to make a first admission: it is hard
to decide whether what affected us more and was of greater
importance to us was our concern with the sciences that we were
taught or with the personalities of our teachers. It is true, at
least, that this second concern was a perpetual undercurrent in all
of us, and that in many of us the path to the sciences led only
through our teachers. Some of us stopped half-way along that path,
and for a few - why not admit as much? - it was on that account
blocked for good and all.

   We courted them or turned our
backs on them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them which
probably had no existence, we studied their characters and on
theirs we formed or misformed our own. They called up our fiercest
opposition and forced us to complete submission; we peered into
their little weaknesses, and took pride in their excellences, their
knowledge and their justice. At bottom we felt a great affection
for them if they gave us any ground for it, though I cannot tell
how many of them were aware of this. But it cannot be denied that
our position in regard to them was a quite remarkable one and one
which may well have had its inconvenience for those concerned. We
were from the very first equally inclined to love and to hate them,
to criticize and respect them. Psycho-analysis has given the name
of ‘ambivalence’ to this readiness to contradictory
attitudes, and it has no difficulty in pointing to the source of
ambivalent feelings of such a kind.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2873

   For psycho-analysis has taught us
that the individual’s emotional attitudes to other people,
which are of such extreme importance to his later behaviour, are
already established at an unexpectedly early age. The nature and
quality of the human child’s relations to people of his own
and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six
years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in
certain directions but he can no longer get rid of them. The people
to whom he is in this way fixed are his parents and his brothers
and sisters. All those whom he gets to know later become substitute
figures for these first objects of his feelings. (We should perhaps
add to his parents any other people, such as nurses, who cared for
him in his infancy.) These substitute figures can be classified
from his point of view according as they are derived from what we
call the ‘imagos’ of his father, his mother, his
brothers and sisters, and so on. His later acquaintances are thus
obliged to take over a kind of emotional heritage; they encounter
sympathies and antipathies to the production of which they
themselves have contributed little. All of his later choices of
friendship and love follow upon the basis of the memory-traces left
behind by these first prototypes.

   Of all the imagos of a childhood
which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important
for a youth or a man than that of his father. Organic necessity
introduces into a man’s relation to his father an emotional
ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the
Greek myth of King Oedipus. A little boy is bound to love and
admire his father, who seems to him the most powerful, the kindest
and the wisest creature in the world. God himself is after all only
an exaltation of this picture of a father as he is represented in
the mind of early childhood. But soon the other side of this
emotional relationship emerges. One’s father is recognized as
the paramount disturber of one’s instinctual life; he becomes
a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to
take his place. Thenceforward affectionate and hostile impulses
towards him persist side by side, often to the end of one’s
life, without either of them being able to do away with the other.
It is in this existence of contrary feelings side by side that lies
the essential character of what we call emotional ambivalence.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2874

   In the second half of childhood a
change sets in in the boy’s relation to his father - a change
whose importance cannot be exaggerated. From his nursery the boy
begins to cast his eyes upon the world outside. And he cannot fail
now to make discoveries which undermine his original high opinion
of his father and which expedite his detachment from his first
ideal. He finds that his father is no longer the mightiest, wisest
and richest of beings; he grows dissatisfied with him, he learns to
criticize him and to estimate his place in society; and then, as a
rule, he makes him pay heavily for the disappointment that has been
caused by him. Everything that is hopeful, as well as everything
that is unwelcome, in the new generation is determined by this
detachment from the father.

   It is in this phase of a
youth’s development that he comes into contact with his
teachers. So that we can now understand our relation to our
schoolmasters. These men, not all of whom were in fact fathers
themselves, became our substitute fathers. That was why, even
though they were still quite young, they struck us as so mature and
so unattainably adult. We transferred on to them the respect and
expectations attaching to the omniscient father of our childhood,
and we then began to treat them as we treated our fathers at home.
We confronted them with the ambivalence that we had acquired in our
own families and with its help we struggled with them as we had
been in the habit of struggling with our fathers in the flesh.
Unless we take into account our nurseries and our family homes, our
behaviour to our schoolmasters would be not only incomprehensible
but inexcusable.

   As schoolboys we had other and
scarcely less important experiences with the successors of our
brothers and sisters - our schoolfellows - but these must be
described elsewhere. In a commemoration of the jubilee of our
school it is on the masters that our thoughts must rest.