ABSTRACT
After the publication of the Freud-Jung correspondence, scholars now agree that Freud's personality decisively stamped itself upon the evolution of psychoanalytic theory and practice.1 We shall see the ways in which Freud's character played an enigmatic role in his friendship with the French Nobel laureate. Because he was unable to separate men from their ideas,2 Freud's exchanges with Rolland were at once intimate and marked by personal frictions. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, they reached an impasse on the question of the origins and significance of the "oceanic" sensation. Freud's mixed feelings for Rolland surfaced again in his 1936 paper, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," written to celebrate the French writer's seventieth birthday. On the other hand, Rolland opposed various key assumptions of the psychoanalytic method for personal and intuitive reasons. The intellectual paths of Freud and Rolland crisscrossed at a time when a wider European effort was under way to grasp the broader import of a recently ruptured civilization.
