Welcome back to the father's house

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“Dear friends, one day we will have to prove the existence of Freud.” (Jacques Lacan)

Imagine a spring evening, in Sigmund “Schlomo” Freud ’s study in London . The house where he lived, fleeing Nazism in 1938, in the last fifteen months of his life. At number 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, the quiet hillside neighborhood in north London, among the avenues and red-brick Georgian houses, gardens like the one in which a black-and-white photograph portrays him, in front of a rose bush, sitting in a wooden deckchair with his wife Martha. His study on the ground floor has remained intact, the library on the upper floor. Imagine an evening here, at Freud’s home and then that of his daughter Anna, which today is the headquarters of the Freud Museum in London, created in 1986 and managed by an entirely private foundation. A small audience gathered in the room for the performance of a theatrical text entitled Father & Freud . A short text that tells about him, that makes him known or rather re-known. This time Freud is in the chair, during his last months, while his first biographer, Dr. Ernest Jones, tries to steal the secrets of his life step by step. An Italian show in Italian (with appropriate undertones in English) that has arrived on its journey to London. The author of the play, who with a grey beard, glasses and a soft linen suit gets into character, with respect but without any false sacredness (at the beginning the old Freud does morning pilates exercises), is called Glauco Maria Genga . He is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lives and works in Milan, where he trained in psychoanalysis with Giacomo B. Contri, one of Lacan's greatest disciples first and then a rediscoverer, in the long years of maturity, of Freud's thought, relaunched in what he called "thought of nature".

“Aunt, talk to me; I’m afraid of the dark. – But what’s the point? You still can’t see me. – It doesn’t matter, if someone speaks there is light.” (Freud, 1905). It is the childish voice off-screen that begins the show. It is the director Adriana Bagnoli who explains to us the meaning of that incipit, which Freud draws from an episode of her three-year-old nephew: “If someone speaks there is light. In the theater, as in analysis, as in life, there is a need for the act of speaking, for the word to make something happen and to be able to provide company and light among the dark things. Within this quote is the figure that I wanted to give to the staging.” On stage, or rather in the middle of the room on the first floor of Maresfield Gardens, together with the author-psychoanalyst who plays the founder of psychoanalysis (the mise en abyme, what a passion) there is the first of his biographers, as well as a student and mistreated follower, Ernest Jones, played by a talented young actor, Giovanni Spadaro Norella, the “stage servant” charged with extracting, among banal memories of life and dry answers, the depths of the human spirit that concern everyone, spectators included. The intent is clear, to bring back to the attention and thoughts of many the existence and consistency of Freud, removing him from the “myth of Freud” .

But why come all the way here, to his home in London, to rediscover Freud? And then with that pairing, Father & Freud (love the ampersand). If you think about how much has been said and is said against fathers, reduced at best to managers of the patriarchy and at worst to real monsters, that “father & son” refers instead explicitly to a founding and even advantageous, productive relationship. We live in an era that has done everything to abolish the father figure, in the name of absolute individual freedom, free from all ties. In which adolescents, children, are reduced to material for the mincer of fiction, Adolescence . Why not instead listen, one evening, to what the father of psychoanalysis – who despite the Oedipus complex was never an advocate of parricide – still has to tell us today about the father, his own father, that Jacob the wool merchant, an observant Jew but not a bigot, without a humanistic education but who played such a large part in his son's story and thoughts?

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There is something that goes beyond the small, delightful London occasion – by the way, Father & Freud, which debuted last year at Out Off in Milan, continues and will continue to tour various places, often in schools – which makes it worth asking about this research by the father of psychoanalysis (“Dear friends, one day we will have to prove Freud’s existence”, is a prophetic quip by Jacques Lacan that already indicated the estrangement and betrayal of his thought). One reason is that psychoanalysis is no longer in fashion today, it is no longer the science of sciences that has crossed and shaped twentieth-century thought . In the scientific and theoretical tools with which the post-modern West today tries to decipher and remedy a profound discomfort of individuals that is far from gone – men, women and obviously children – other paths prevail. The discoveries of neuroscience and the medical practices that derive from them, which tend to reduce the mystery of the human psyche to a question of biology and chemistry . Cognitive sciences with their models, and even psychology reduced to instructions for use that is practiced at the ASL counters or schools. There are other ways, all legitimate, with which specialists and legions of more or less authorized operators try to indicate, especially to young people, the survival techniques with which to buffer, hide, but rarely resolve, their own discomforts, conflicts, deep suffering.

Today psychoanalysis is no longer in fashion, it is no longer the science of sciences that has crossed and shaped the thought of the twentieth century.

A few days ago, in an interview, the well-known psychologist Maria Rita Parsi cited a survey according to which 15 percent of young people between the ages of 11 and 25 resort to artificial intelligence to get answers to their psychological problems. A borderline case, to be taken with a grain of salt, but one that says something about the desire for shortcuts and facilitations with which we deal with our experiences. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is regarded with suspicion of not being a true science – Freud, as a doctor, was very keen on the fact that his discipline was a science of the mind without presuppositions and most of his vociferous academic clashes revolved around this definition –, a debate that has been going on for a century and will never end. But today, what makes Dr. Sigmund Freud even more suspect, unwieldy, is his insistence on the question of the relationship with the father – the principle of authority, however you want to spin it – and even more so if, digging, as the script of Father & Freud does, you come across the father of an assimilated Jewish doctor and intellectual but who, like his father Jacob, never stopped questioning the Book of Books, the one that speaks of the Father. Freud is no longer in fashion because we are desperately trying, or have succeeded, in doing away with the Father. And in their own small way, our tiny everyday fathers too .

A thin thread of fantasy leads the biographical story (“The challenge of the show is to bring the audience into the daily life of a genius, approaching his life before his works”, says director Bagnoli). Not only that: on Freud’s immense production of writings, notes, notebooks and letters, many letters, there is also a meticulous philological excavation that Genga transposes into the text, supported by the research work of Gabriella Pediconi, professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Urbino. “Based on the evidence of my senses, I am now on the Acropolis, but I cannot believe it”. The epicentre of the story is here. It is a famous letter written to his friend Romain Rolland in 1936, “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis”, in which Freud retraces the episode decades later, at the end of his life. Until finally giving it an interpretation as a moment of profound reflection on the relationship with his father.

Freud is no longer in fashion because we are desperately trying, or have succeeded, in eliminating the Father. And in their small way even our tiny everyday fathers

In the summer of 1904, Sigmund and his brother Alexander went on holiday together, as always. They went, due to a series of fortuitous and forced circumstances that the doctor will never stop reflecting on, to Athens. An exceptional destination for him, a great lover of Greek culture. But something happens there. “So all this really exists, just as we learned at school?!” was his first thought. “That day on the Acropolis I could have asked my brother: 'And now we are in Athens, we are on the Acropolis... We have really come a long way!'”. Then an illness, a strange fainting spell (something more than a banal Stendhal syndrome) that he could not explain . And that many years later he would connect, almost as a remorse, to the thought that had come to him of his father.

That father who had not studied the classics, who had not become as famous as his son, a doctor. In the letter he writes: “If we are allowed to compare such a small event with a greater one, did it not happen that Napoleon I, during his coronation at Notre Dame, turned to one of his brothers – it must have been the eldest, Joseph – to comment: 'What would Monsieur notre père say, if he could be here now?'”. The sudden, illuminating and piercing thought of a father who never went to the Acropolis and who perhaps would not have understood it, and which arouses an unconscious remorse as it does for so many lives of misunderstood sons and fathers. A sudden thought – “You live like a fool, but sometimes excellent thoughts come to your mind”, is the first of Andrei Sinyavskij’s Sudden Thoughts. But Sigmund “Shlomo” Freud did not live like a fool and excellent thoughts were his daily work. And so, the sudden thought that his father Jacob, like Napoleon's "Monsieur notre père", could have been happy to see his son contemplating the Acropolis at the height of his success, that he could even have been pleased - this is the word from the Gospel that Genga chooses for his explanation - by the fact that a son had succeeded well in life. That he had surpassed his father. "But here we encounter the solution to the little problem...", Freud writes: "It must be that a sense of guilt remains attached to the satisfaction of having come so far; there is something illicit in this, forbidden from the earliest age... It is as if the essence of success consisted in going further than the father, and that it was still forbidden to want to surpass the father... Our father was a merchant, he had no humanistic education, and Athens could not have meant much to him . So, what spoiled the joy of the trip to Athens was a feeling of 'filial piety'."

But what if this remorse, this “filial piety”, could be resolved – certainly not always, certainly not in all situations and existences – in something other than a parricide, or an oppression? The meaning that Genga tries to extract is this: “A father can be pleased with his son and with the success of the son who has surpassed him” . This is, after all, the most interesting thing to rediscover about Freud: even more so in a moment of our civilization in which that relationship – a father & a son who are pleased – has been tragically expelled even as a possibility.

The path that led Glauco Genga here, to the meeting with the Freud Foundation in London, starts from afar; the first idea came to him many years ago, during a visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna together with colleagues from the psychoanalytic association founded by Giacomo B. Contri which today is called, precisely, the Society of Friends of Thought Sigmund Freud. There is an interview with Contri from 1992, in which he did not speak of the fathers or Freud but, curiously, of Saint Augustine – who thirty years ago was not even in fashion in the church as it is in these first days of Leo XIV , the Pope “son of Augustine”. The Milanese psychoanalyst said: “According to the experience and doctrine of my work, men are divided into two categories: those who are centered on fulfillment, or satisfaction, and those who are not… Those for whom the Father’s motive is decisive, and those who reject it. But rejecting the Father is like affirming that no universe exists: because Father means universe”. And, returning to Augustine of the City of God, the subject of the conversation with the magazine 30 Giorni, he added: “The world is divided exactly in two, just like two distinct cities: on one side those who live in relationship with the universe, who are centered on fulfillment and on the Father; on the other the ramshackle city of those who are not” . And he concluded. “Let’s finish it, we’ve been fools for too long… Freud was the only, I repeat only case of thought, in all of modernity, that brought the Father back into the limelight (by the way: weren’t Christians the ones who could talk about the Father?)”.

It begins with children. It is significant that Freud's last daughter, Anna, who followed her parents into exile - and who never had a simple and resolved relationship with her father - carried out precious and experimental work with children throughout her life, in this house and in a house next door that was later sold by her heirs. She was a refugee who cared for refugees during the war . While London was being bombed, she devoted herself to creating residential nurseries for children left without a home or parents. At the Hampstead Child Therapy Course, Anna Freud initiated a whole generation of future child psychoanalysts. Two years before her death, in 1982, she set up a charity and left the house at 20 Maresfield Gardens as a legacy for the creation of the museum. The rebellion against fathers has been going on for two or three generations now (or many more? Contri said that the inventor of adolescence was Dostoevsky, whom Freud considered a pinnacle of literature), with results that we could define as contrasting. Today there is a war not only of generations against what is called patriarchy.

“What happened to Freud in 1904 is not at all a ‘private’ affair of his – comments Genga – In more than thirty years of professional practice with the couch, I have noticed that many of my patients’ sessions revolve around the same issue that Freud was able to grasp and relaunch also thanks to what happened to him on the Acropolis” . That ancient and temporary symptom, the fainting, speaks of a necessary father with whom one can reconcile. Genga explains: Freud is forgotten precisely because he speaks of the father and, as a true Jew, in addition to his own, he speaks of Jahve. But his judgment is denied today, because it would be a judgment of condemnation, or rather of salvation. “Because it forces us to think about the totality of the human”. Now that we are going strong even with real parricides, there is much to rethink, and without delay.

The show closes with the famous notes of Cat Stevens, his Father and Son (1970), which speaks of the identification of the son with the father. “But how many have realized that that conflict hid the mirror of a mutual love?”, says the psychoanalyst. “The path inaugurated by psychoanalysis does not involve parricide, but rather the rediscovery of the path of one’s own affirmation, even surpassing the father, who might even be pleased with it” .

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