Rendez-Vous — S. Freud

— Cornelis de Bondt

On 23 April 1938, at ten o’clock in the morning, I check in at Hotel Stefanie, in the Taborstraße in Vienna, a half-hour walk from Freud’s address. At that point he will still be living at Berggasse 19 for another month. I intend to visit Freud the following day — again a Sunday, just as with Emma. I still need to speak to her by telephone first; I assume that will be possible today. I will not need to take up much of her time.

The maid answers the telephone and says that I can try to reach Frau Jung at five o’clock. Indeed, at that time I manage to get Emma briefly on the line. I tell her that I am going to attempt to speak with Doktor Freud tomorrow, and ask whether she has heard about Anna’s arrest, and whether she thinks this might reduce my chances of being received by Herr Freud. She says that she had indeed heard about it; the news had been circulating among analysts, in Zurich, Vienna and also Berlin. She adds that she mentioned Anna in her letter of recommendation, because my background as a composer and musician connects with her research into linguistic symbolism. “I suspect he will be willing to see you,” she says, “perhaps not for very long — but that will also depend on your questions.”

After my conversation with Emma, I immediately walk to Freud’s house to request an appointment with Herr Doktor Freud. I hand Emma’s letter of recommendation to the maid who opens the door and explain the reason for my request.

— § —

Two days later, on 25 April, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I present myself at the house of the famous psychiatrist. I am taken straight to the consulting room. Freud comes out from behind his desk and studies me intently. Then he shakes my hand and says: “Sie haben offenbar einen Eindruck bei Frau Jung hinterlassen. Das ist eine Kunst für sich.”

When I ask whether it would be possible to have a single therapeutic session with him, he replies that this is impossible. “Ich kann Ihnen ein Gespräch anbieten — keine Analyse.” He explains that an ‘analysis’ requires a series of sessions. In any case, he has no time for that now; he must prepare his departure for London. He points to a chair opposite his desk and resumes his seat behind it. I sit down opposite him. “What would you like to discuss with me?”

“Ich verstehe, daß wir dieses Gespräch keine Anna nennen können — keine Analyse, meine ich — aber…” I freeze, see Freud frown slightly, and wait resignedly for a sharp remark — but to my surprise he says nothing. I glance at an inkwell standing on a marble slab and add, with a sheepish laugh, “I will do my utmost not to knock over that inkwell…”

He laughs. “Aha — you are familiar with my Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. Are you planning to test my theory here against practice?”

“That is certainly not my intention,” I reply with a somewhat nervous smile, “but with me one never knows. I have put into practice, many times over, all the ‘mistakes’, ‘slips’, ‘misreaches’ — well, the whole series you describe. Especially in my youth.”

“Why do you mention Anna’s name?” he asks. “Have you ever met her, or read a publication of hers? Let us examine this slip.”

“No. I do know that she has written about analysis with children, and that she published a book on the ‘Ego’ and ‘defence mechanisms’, but I have not yet read those texts. I think my slip has to do with the telephone conversation I had yesterday with Frau Jung. She spoke about the threatening situation here in Vienna, and about Anna’s arrest. I therefore hesitated about whether I should make an appointment with you at all — or rather, whether I dared to.”

“Fear is not a theoretical problem these days,” he says, studying me closely. “So caution is advisable. What caused your hesitation — was it for a personal reason, or rather for a politically charged one? What exactly made you hesitate?”

“I think it was a combination of factors. I am rather prone to fear — of the world, of large crowds of people, but also of men in ‘uniforms’. Not necessarily a military uniform; even the overalls of a window cleaner or a carpenter strike me as frightening.”

“Since when have you had such fears?”

“Since my childhood. My mother forced me to play outside with my friends.”

“And what did you do then — did you do what your mother told you, or did you devise a way to escape it?”

“I had no method or strategy, or anything of the sort. I simply tried to escape. Sometimes that worked, but usually it did not.”

Freud changes the subject and says: “You had not finished your sentence when you made that slip. What was it you wanted to say?”

I have to think for a moment, but then say, “I’ve forgotten.” — “You don’t just make something like that up,” I add.

Freud tilts his head slightly and looks at me thoughtfully, but says nothing.


“Is it important?” I finally ask.

“You tell me,” he replies curtly.

“We’ll only know that if I remember it again,” I say evasively.

He looks at me intently; those piercing eyes make me slightly uneasy. He remains silent. I rack my brains.

“I was distracted by my slip. Perhaps there wasn’t even a concrete continuation of the sentence; the conjunction ‘aber’ then functions as a kind of postponement mechanism.” I notice that he is at least not looking at me disapprovingly, and press on bravely. “That slip… I’m not sure whether its cause is your daughter’s name — in that case it could have to do with my fear of hurting you, and instead of avoiding the name I end up saying it after all; a form of self-sabotage. I have done that repeatedly in my life, especially in my youth. But there is another possibility: that it concerns the concept of ‘analysis’. You meant it in the sense of ‘psychoanalysis’, but the word is broader. Perhaps I wanted to point out that our ‘conversation’ can very well have analytical aspects. And that, too, I then sabotage.”

Now he does respond. “You are right that I meant ‘analysis’ in the psychoanalytic sense, and for that we lack the time. In such a session I would have pursued that notion of ‘self-sabotage’; that would probably have been a promising line.”

There is a knock at the door. After a confirming growl from Freud, the maid enters with tea and some refreshments.

“Let us now turn to the questions you have,” Freud says once the maid has left the room and he has poured the tea for us. “If I have understood correctly from Frau Jung’s letter, you are searching for the ‘origin’ of things: art, our psyche, the unconscious — and thus, ultimately, the question of life and death.”

“Indeed,” I reply. “I have two questions which are fundamental to me, and which I would like to put to you. And now I suddenly remember what I wanted to say to you in that sentence with the slip — namely, that in my view there is an analogy between these two matters, although they appear to be unrelated. One concerns the origin of the unconscious, which I discussed with Frau Jung, and the other the theme of ‘friendship and betrayal’. Let me begin with the first, which I would like to pose in the form of a question: ‘Did Plato have an unconscious?’ If the answer is yes, then you have discovered the concept. But if the answer is no, then you have invented it. That seems to me a crucial difference.”

“Ha!” he says. “You are trying to force me into a specific answer by restricting me to a simple ‘yes or no’. But that is not how it works with me.” He looks at me sternly, though I also detect a faint sparkle in his eyes. He takes a sip of his tea and continues: “Let us weigh both answers against each other and see where we end up.”

Only now do I notice how old Freud looks; is that age, or the threat of Nazism? Nevertheless his voice sounds firm and clear. “Plato undoubtedly had an unconscious, just as he knew fear, and presumably, like you and me, made slips and mistakes, suffered lapses of memory, and so on. But he was not conscious of that concept; it simply had not yet been formulated. One could say that the unconscious existed in the psyche, but not yet in language; it still had to be formulated — and that, in itself, could be called an invention: a linguistic invention.”

“Frau Jung put it in similar terms,” I say. “In short: ‘The theory is discovered in the psyche, but invented in language.’”

“Emma is a brilliant thinker; on many matters we agree. That also applies to her husband, Carl, with whom I eventually broke. Such is life.” — He now refers to Jung by his first name. Perhaps because he did so with his wife as well? — “There are also differences; that break has to do with them, but I will not go into that now. For Emma, the unconscious is above all an aspect of the symbolic order — not merely an articulation of the psyche, but also a historical-linguistic, non-biological phenomenon. Whereas I maintain that the unconscious is universal, and that at a certain point the concept was discovered. That Plato was not aware of the concept of the ‘unconscious’ is irrelevant to the fact that he nevertheless possessed one. She, by contrast, will argue that although it is part of the psyche, it is ultimately also an invention.”

“Then a fundamental difference between the two of you is that, for you, the unconscious is a universal — and perhaps even unchanging — factor?”

“Nein, das ist zu einfach,” he replies, slightly irritable. “Human biology — the body, its organs and parts — remains unchanged. But not the masks a person puts on, or can put on. Those depend on the culture in which one grows up. The Es, however, is unchanging. Our deepest desires and necessities, our drives and our dependence on laws and environment, are constant in that sense. For Frau Jung and her husband it is different; in my view, wrongly so. They maintain that the Es is also shaped by the environment in which a person grows up. They would therefore argue that Plato’s unconscious was essentially different from that of modern man, say here in Vienna. And yet they still connect it to the psyche.”

“Because the Jung couple link the unconscious to archetypes and the symbolic world?” I ask.

“Tatsächlich.” He shifts his inkwell a few millimetres.

“Then I suggest we move on to the second subject, although, as I said, it probably overlaps with the first.”

He merely nods, so I take a sip of tea and continue quickly. “The subject is friendship and betrayal. Not an everyday betrayal, but betrayal on a fundamental level — Brutus and Julius Caesar, for instance. My first question would then be whether there was really friendship in such a case at all, or whether that was an illusion. Is friendship not supposed to be unconditional?”

“That is more than one question — questions with fundamental consequences,” he replies. “I shall explain to what extent they are connected.”

“To begin with,” he continues, “friendship is not based on truth. To turn your question around: Why should loyalty be the measure of truth? What may be experienced as truth in a friendship at one moment can turn into a feeling of betrayal at another. That only demonstrates the intensity of the friendship. One could even put it more strongly: without betrayal, no true friendship. What binds us to one another can also betray us. That is the price.”

“Hmm…” I hesitate, but try nevertheless. “Then friendship would not be unconditional? And therefore not an ethical or moral act?”

“Nein, auf keinen Fall!’ He jabs the air with his index finger. I keep a close eye on the inkwell. “And the same applies to love. The purity you seek in friendship and love is idealistic, moral, religious — and in fact a play of our psyche. The conditions in friendship or love are unconscious. Love and friendship are Besetzungen, psychic investments.”

“Even parental love for a child? Should that not be unconditional? Is that not biologically determined?”

‘Aber klar! Parental love is not an ethical act. It is what I call a libidinöse Besetzung, based on instinctive care, protection, reproductive drive — in short, a drive. But — and this is essential — there is a ‘moral mask’: the child experiences this love as unconditional. That ambivalence is fundamental in order to secure the formation of the Über-Ich. This is no different from friendship.”

I seize the opportunity for a question I had prepared earlier. “Is the Über-Ich not a sublimated form of fear?”

“The Über-Ich is not a neutral organ, not a moral instrument; it is a psychic residue of love, fear and internalisation. If the child experiences fear of losing parental love — for example in the form of punishment — then this fear is psychically sublimated into ‘conscience’, ‘guilt’, or an ‘inner moral voice’. The Über-Ich is, in that sense, sublimated fear, arising from parental love. That love must appear unconditional, yet it is nevertheless ambivalent. Genau wie jede Freundschaft, jede Bindung — ja selbst die Liebe zwischen Brutus und Caesar. Das gilt auch für meine Freundschaft mit Doktor Jung.”

I try to gain some time by slowly taking a few small sips of tea. I am not sure whether he will appreciate the next question, but it must be asked. I see that he notices my hesitation.

He says nothing, but nods slightly. I take it as encouragement. “I have a painful question, but it has to be asked. Is betrayal, in your view, ultimately the same as evil? And I mean what I would call ultimate evil — that of the Nazis. That makes the question personal, hence my hesitation.”

“It would help you if you finally dared to face your fears. You may ask me any question without asking for permission; no question can unsettle me. You are not responsible for my well-being.” He lets these words sink in, then continues. “Your question is certainly relevant, and I will answer it at length.”

What follows is a lecture. “To begin with the notion of ‘ultimate evil’: when we use that term — for example to designate the evil of Nazism — we renounce understanding it. That would make that evil even more dangerous than it already is. ‘Ultimate evil’ is a moralistic concept rather than a psychological analysis. It is therefore more useful to start from what I have called the Todestrieb, a fundamental destructive drive, which can turn outward in threat and violence, or inward, in the experience of shame and guilt. Nazism is not a phenomenon in itself; it is this death drive on a collective level. I wrote about this eight years ago in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Civilisation is ultimately a thin veneer, deliberately damaged by the Nazis, through legitimised aggression and the trick of displacing guilt onto the other — the Jews, in this case. But Der Jude ist nicht der Grund — er ist das Ziel der Entlastung. By calling this evil ‘ultimate’, one in fact legitimises it.”

I was, quite frankly, given a lesson in ‘objectwise versus subjectwise’ by that old psychoanalyst. Rather confronting! I had no retort, nor a question.

Freud glanced at me and continued, unperturbed. “Furthermore, you asked whether ‘betrayal’ and ‘evil’ — particularly as committed by the Nazis — are ultimately one and the same. As I have argued before, I do not view the phenomenon of ‘betrayal’ as a moral question; betrayal belongs to friendship as wetness belongs to water. Nazism concerns a betrayal of civilisation.

“One could say that betrayal is a démasqué of the inherent ambivalence linked to friendship or parenthood. Evil, as carried out by the Nazis, is an amplification of that; in friendship it occurs in the private sphere, in Nazism in the public. At its core, it is the same. Nazism exposes the darkest, most destructive aspects of humanity. But that evil is not the opposite of the good; evil and good are not opposing objects. One who demonises the traitor need not examine oneself. Betrayal is deeper; it occurs in the act itself.”

Freud pours himself another cup of tea. “I understand the personal dimension of your question; Nazi evil affects me and my family very deeply. But it is not only the private that is betrayed — my daughter, if you will — it also strikes the state and ultimately our civilisation. And furthermore, it is the illusion that we are protected. Man verrät uns nicht zuerst durch Haß. Man verrät uns, indem man uns zeigt, daß wir geglaubt haben, geschützt zu sein.”

“Can we make this issue personal in another way, namely through your (fractured) relationship with the Jung couple?”

“Selbstverständlich,” he replies, tracing circles in the air with his hand, perhaps urging me to be swift.

“Could Doctor Jung identify with your rejection of the notion of ‘ultimate evil’, or does this rather touch on your rupture?”

“No, and yes,” he begins. “No, he could not identify with it, and yes, it does touch on our conflict.”

The old founder of psychoanalysis settles himself. “Frau und Herr Jung sprechen von ‘Schatten’, evil, as in the case of Nazism, which casts Germany into its shadow. In that sense, they do speak of a form of ‘radical evil’, both psychologically and symbolically. And there lies the difference with my views. They explain evil through their theory of archetypes, which can therefore arise from the psyche; but, and here is our difference, this leads to an objectification in images, myths, and figures. That I reject; for me, evil is entirely a psychologically explicable articulation of drives, such as aggression and destruction. In the Jung couple, evil becomes an autonomous entity, a sort of quasi-reality; they see a form of compensation, where I see chaos. The Jung couple found me reductive, mistrustful of symbolism, while I consider their quasi-religious approach psychologically impure. An irreparable rupture.”

“You speak of ‘radical evil’. Is this the same notion as Kant’s in his text on religion and reason?”

“Nein. Not for me, nor for Jung. For Kant, radical evil concerns a moral structure; for him, ultimately, it is an ethical matter. For Jung, it is primarily a psychic reality. And for me, an articulation of the Todestrieb.”

I notice Freud preparing to stand; the conversation is apparently concluded. I quickly ask one final question: “May I pose a very short, final question? About an anecdote Frau Jung told me concerning the Gestapo visiting your house.”

He nods, albeit with some reluctance. “You had to fill in a form for your emigration to England. You would have written in response to whether you had been treated well: ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.’ Does this not succinctly capture your view on how to confront evil? We must resist evil with sovereignty.”

A faint, lightly sarcastic grin appears. “Did Emma also tell you the source of this, admittedly apocryphal, anecdote?”

“She mentioned a certain Madame Bonaparte.”

“Ach, ja… Marie, meine Prinzessin…” he looks at his inkwell with a tender expression.

He moves the inkwell to the edge of his desk. “I told her that I had wished to do that, but refrained so as not to endanger my family further. Such things then take on a life of their own. Without her, we could not have emigrated, by the way. Was Marie für uns getan hat… Unvorstellbar!” And then he really stands.

He walks me to the front door; we shake hands, and I wish him and his family strength in these dark times. “Long ago, I underwent therapy for the loss of my beloved, and lamented the all-consuming pain. My therapist then said: ‘No one has ever died from pain.’ The question is what you do with it. I said I wanted to step over it, or around it. She replied, ‘That does not work; you have no choice but to go straight through it.’”

“Does that pain strike another, or is it perhaps the pain for yourself?”

“Is there ultimately a difference between the two?”

— § —

I am once again at home in my own time, sitting under my large red parasol, tucked in the corner between the door to the living quarters and the wall perpendicular to the house; a fine, sheltered spot. It is raining cats and dogs. The rapid patter of drops on the canvas is occasionally punctuated by a heavy sheet of water that has pooled atop the parasol, overflowing and smashing onto the tiled path leading to the driveway. I puff on a cigar, with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc within easy reach.

Of the six encounters so far, the Rendez-Vous with Freud is by far the most confronting. I had expected different answers to some fundamental questions. I might have been forewarned, of course, since Emma Jung had already surprised me with some of her responses. She had indicated that the notion of ‘originality’ is less straightforward than I had thought, and that the question of whether something in psychology is ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ is itself problematic. On that point, some ideas and assumptions of the Jung couple and Freud show remarkable convergence, despite the obvious differences; at least, in my view. My question to Emma — ‘Does Jung’s theory have an absolute origin?’ — I sharpened for Freud: ‘Did Plato have an unconscious?’ If the answer is affirmative, then Freud (or rather Pierre Janet) discovered that phenomenon. But if the answer is negative, which I find an appealing thought, then it was invented; it became part of language.

Emma and Freud do not allow me to get away with a simple ‘yes or no’; both problematise the question, each in their own way.

The ambivalent answer, elegantly summarised by Emma, ‘The theory is discovered in the psyche, but invented in language’, and the rejection by both Jung and Freud of the notion of ‘unconditional friendship (or love)’ make me reconsider the premises in my earlier texts. For instance, about unconditional art. Yet that threatens to topple my entire methodology regarding the artistic judgement.

It feels as if everything around me is collapsing — my teeth, my physical condition, my professional practice; all seems to herald the approach of death. Perhaps my methodology is, in effect, an escape attempt? One thing became clear to me during several sleepless hours last night: the suggestion that older people, at least in our wealthy Western world, lead a comfortable life, enjoying retirement and free from work pressures — ‘boomers’ in short — stands in stark contrast to the imminent, unavoidable death approaching them. That is anything but comfortable. No one need rise for me on the tram, nor address me with formal politeness, yet my views must be taken seriously.

There is a glimmer of hope regarding my methodology: Jung and Freud speak primarily from a psychological perspective; they largely reject a moral standpoint. In doing so, they distance themselves from Kant. When I confront Freud with Kant’s notion of ‘radical evil’, he dismisses it. He sees it as a moral premise, and in his view, morality has little to do with evil. Evil is an articulation of the Todestrieb, both on a personal and collective level.

Jung does not reject the notion of ‘radical evil’ per se, though neither he nor his wife used the term literally, but Jung frequently speaks of the ‘shadow’ [Schatten], which comes close. For Jung, evil is not merely an effect; it is a substantive aspect of the psyche, which can objectify in images, myths, and figures. The ‘shadow’ encompasses more than what is repressed; it comprises that which is existentially denied. In this way, it acquires a ‘quasi-existence’, and that is a reality.

In short, for both Freud and Jung, the psyche is primary. This is a fundamentally different starting point than Kant’s view. I must rethink my ideas on artistic judgement, especially concerning the concepts of ‘absolute purity’, ‘truth’, and ‘universality’. This seems to concern the question of whether it is ultimately a personal matter — psyche — or a universal philosophical matter.

A provisional route emerges, possibly leading to a way forward: for Freud and Jung, concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘evil’, and ‘betrayal’ are articulations of a psychic reality, within which they can be experienced and go awry. The question is whether this has a universal quality — for Freud, in the structure of the psyche; for Jung, in the archetypal patterns thereof; although always within the individual subject. Whereas for Kant, the universal lies outside the psyche, in the ‘moral law’, ‘reason’, and ‘duty’. For him, the psyche is the domain of ‘inclinations’ (Neigungen), it is not a matter of validity. Where Kant places the universal outside the human, Freud and Jung locate it in the psyche — not as an articulation of the private, but as a shared human condition.

The issue now before me concerns the borderland between Kant on the one hand and Freud and Jung on the other. Where do they meet?

The crux for Kant lies in the ‘antinomy of the judgement of taste’, which he addresses via a dialectical contradiction: the thesis is that such judgement is not based on concepts and therefore cannot be demonstrated or proven; the antithesis is that the judgement nonetheless lays claim to universal validity. This tension between the two statements is intrinsic to artistic judgement. For Kant, this is no shortcoming; it is a constitutive feature. He therefore does not speak of artistic criteria, but only of the universal conditions to which such judgement must conform. The judgement cannot claim ‘truth’, because of its conceptless premise, but it can appeal to ‘necessity’, a ‘purposefulness without a purpose’ [Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck]. Kant makes no pronouncement on the psyche, because artistic judgement is neither knowledge, nor morality, nor a personal opinion.

Freud and Jung begin precisely there, with the question of what in the psyche enables us to be moved by something disinterested, which moreover claims general validity. The psychological approach of Freud and Jung demonstrates how Kant’s assumptions about ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘purposefulness without a purpose’ can operate via the psyche. General validity then arises, for Freud, from shared psychic conflicts and recognition of unconscious structures, and for Jung from the patterns of archetypes and symbols.

Well, a beginning, but little more than that. Many clouds will still be required to give birth to angels.

— Loosduinen, 19 December 2025