Stirring up the Underworld
Freud begins The Interpretation of Dreams with a latin inscription from Aeneas book VII: “if I cannot call upon heaven, I will raise hell” (Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo). Functioning as a kind of classical imprimatur this graphs the psychoanalytic project onto a very old tradition while doubling as a literary clue by which we may imagine Freud, like the epic hero Aeneas, traveling down into the underworld to visit his recently deceased dad.
And yet there is more than a figurative sense in this “hell raising” for in a letter quoted in footnote Freud’s translation is “stir up the underworld,” and, while he goes on to claim that this act is not “promethean,” I will politely attribute this negation to his own modesty. Later on in this same book, as Freud wanders ever further into the dreamworld of his childhood, he recounts a story his father told him in which a Christian knocks off his father’s new fur hat and shouts at him to get off the sidewalk. To the 11 year-old Freud’s dismay his big strong father merely steps into the street and picks up his hat. This amounts to Freud’s first encounter with history; an awakening of what it means to belong to an alien race. Forever after, as he reveals here at the red-hot center of his dreambook, he had often imagined himself as the semitic general Hannibal, crossing the alps, to bring destruction down upon Rome. This dream is less that of the conquistador that some have claimed than that of the promethean overthrow of Christian hubris itself. The hell that the Christians had been so keen to project outward, either making it real, over there, for Jews, heretics, and infidels, or by promising an everlasting hell as punishment in the afterlife, is now returned to them, made legible in the language of mental illness. The hell visited without is a hell already within.
Keeping in mind that hell is not a metaphor, we may speculate that the new science founded by Freud is the initial phase of what we might call a Science of Hell.
Map of Hell, 1490’s, Sandro Botticelli
