Freud: Taurus or Pisces?

For some time I’ve been pursuing the idea that Freud’s correct birthday was March 6, not May 6. The almost universally accepted May 6, 1856 date (6:30 pm, Freiberg, Moravia, now Pribor, Czech Republic) appears authoritatively in the first sentence of Freud’s official biography, written by his close associate and disciple, Ernest Jones. Yet that very sentence bears a footnote (deleted from the abridged edition) joking that the actual birth may have taken place two months earlier, seven months after the wedding of Freud’s parents.

Freud wrote a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, yet this blatant, jocular slur against his mother has been ignored by most biographers, even though he himself exposed suspicions that he was sired by his half-brother.

To my mind, given all that we now know about Freud, the March 6 horoscope is the more apt of the two. I will not repeat here the biographical and astrological material supporting my opinion, which was published in an article in the Astrological Journal (March/April 2000). I have only recently, however, come across Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, M. D., who reports that one of the most compelling documents supporting the May 6 birthdate, the so-called “inscription” in the Family Bible, is not an inscription at all, but merely sheets of paper found in the rebound book, which is otherwise empty of any family records.

The carefully transcribed birth data include the (alleged) date of the month and the day of the week for the birth and the circumcision, in the gentile and the Jewish calendars, eight dates in all. But it is followed by a charmingly spontaneous (and ungrammatical) sentence that is marred by a slip of the pen: “On the fourth of [illegible], [1]856, my son mentioned above, long may he live, got three teeth. Freud himself insisted, “most mistakes in writing dates are motivated”. Is it possible that the slip reveals the fear that the true date of the first dentition might undermine the carefully wrought falsification above it? The sentence has a tender charm that throws into question the veridicality of the formal sentences above; which also include the solemn record of Sigmund's grandfather's death. Does one put death and baby teeth on the same page?

Granted, other documentary obstacles remain in the way of the March birthdate. However, the reverential attitude towards and legendary status of some of these documents suggest they may not have been examined interrogatively. Several poor photo copies are contradicted by earlier reported descriptions. Many biographies elide the fact that Freud's two uncles were professional forgers.  One of the uncles was imprisoned, much to Freud's shame, and the Manchester branch of the Freud family was implicated; Manchester was the manufacturing  source of counterfeit rubles that flooded eastern Europe via Vienna prior to WW 1 and we know surprisingly little, given the glut of biographical research, about the Manchester Freuds.

The circumstances around Freud's birthrecords therefore are far from transparent. He was not born in the orthodox shtetl where no one could keep a secret, but in a small enclave of suspiciously foreign Ostjuden, stigmatized and transient, hardly to be distinguished from gypsies, the piety of some family members notwithstanding. At the time of his birth, the family was crowded into one room above the shop of a gentile locksmith.

It is worth pointing out that the March birthdate has numerous supporters, including some distinguished Freudian scholars and theorists: Marie Balmary made the most extensive argument in Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis (1979); Wladimir Granoff assents in the published 1975 lectures Filiations, philosopher Andrea Nye; and Jay and Jean Harris, both MDs about whom I can learn nothing, in The One-Eyed Doctor Sigismund Freud (1984). (Although the Harrises are not apparently astrological they also indicate the role of ichthyologic (i. e. Piscean) imagery in Freud's story.) The issue is even raised in some psychology textbooks. Though unproven, it is far from inplausible.

It is hard to read (for instance) the last chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and not feel that Freud was, at times, massively daft, in a way best described by the amazing close conjunction of Sun, Moon, Neptune and Jupiter, all square Saturn, which took place on March 6, 1856. There is a gradually assembling consensus that the vast influence of Freud on the mind of the twentieth century was in some way delusional. As formers markers of personal identity are slowly eroded under the influence of psychopharmacology, the digitalization of communication and the archive, assisted reproductive technologies, etc., we look back on the Freudian mythos with the newly-liberated cultist’s stunned sense of incomprehension and wonder. At any rate, nothing seems more dated than Freud’s desperate insistence on the orthogonality of the rational and the irrational. That's the Saturn square Pisces in the March 6 chart; that’s why I’m glad I always kept up my astrology.