ABSTRACT
Freud’s account of his strange experience on the Athenian Acropolis touches on these ordinary delusions – significantly those to do with conception and mortality. The event itself took place when Freud was 48, and perplexed him well into his later years, lending credence to Money-Kyrle’s insight that these earliest, necessarily grandiose, fantasies –inevitable at the start of life – often accompany even the most self-reflective of us, however unconsciously, to its very end. The author views vestiges of this infantile omnipotence evident in those feelings described by Freud as the ‘derealization’ that characterises the story of his visit to Athens, written in response to an invitation to contribute to the 70th birthday celebrations honouring a distinguished friend, the French philosopher Romain Rolland. The phenomenon that Freud describes has a distinctly uncanny character that the author traces back to the earliest defences against separation, loss and consequent intimations of mortality, alongside fear of the return of something that has been repressed.
