Freud and the Great Greece. Metamorphoses of the 'exotic' journey between ancient and modern imaginary

Sigmund Freud was gnawed by the “worm of the journey”, especially by the desire of visiting Rome. A close relationship of interdependence exists indeed between Freud's love for Italy and the discovery of psychoanalysis. Italy was, for the first analyst, the Other Scene where to represent his Oedipal story in a phantasmal way: a true love story punctuated with about twenty trips. Freud will go to Italy in order to follow an almost compulsive itinerary, to look for the trace of his paternal identifications (in the Hannibal and Goethe’s wake, among others), and especially to seek the place and the images of a mysterious femininity that will take him to the ecstatic contemplation, not only of many Venus and Madonnas of the great Italian masters, but also of the most humble archaic Sicilian statues. It is important to keep in mind that the southern stages of these journeys are not less meaningful than the Roman ones, if Freud felt a no longer to be extended need of a stage in Sicily before a last passage through Rome in 1913. After he visited the ruins of Pompei and Paestum in 1902, that certainly stimulated his interest in Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud will go to Sicily in 1910, accompanied by Sandor Ferenczi. This journey was stormy for the young disciple who implored the love of a Maître who, mindful of his old passion for Fliess, drastically declined. But what was Freud looking for in Sicily: at Palermo, Castelvetrano, Syracuse?