ABSTRACT
In September 1911, Sigmund Freud travelled to Weimar to attend the Third International Psychoanalytical Congress. There he delivered a paper, his “Postscript” to the Schreber case, in which he initiates a discussion of “totemic habits of thought”. In retrospective, Freud came to regard the Weimar congress as the midpoint between two betrayals. It was preceded by the defections of Adler and Stekel in Vienna and followed by the break-off of the Zurich group including Jung and Bleuler. Freud responded to Goethe’s poem on its centenary in 1911 and produced an unusual two-page paper with the same title, tracing the continuity of Ephesian religious tradition from the oriental mother-goddess Oupis, to the Roman Diana, to the Holy Virgin Mary. If Freud makes no reference to psychoanalysis, this brief account of a constructive/destructive matriarch/goddess can be read as a pendant to Totem and Taboo in which he develops the idea of a strong male who violently dominates the primal horde.
