Sigmund Freud "beard shiny (Lichtbart), in the poem by Paul Celan.

The image of the post is taken from a painting painted in 1654 by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, entitled "Portrait of an old Jew", painted when Rembrand's painting turned towards an increasingly internalized representation of reality. It is located at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

An explicit reference to Sigmund Freud opens the poem of Paul Celan "Fadensonnen-.Filament of sun" It is the second poem after" Frankfurt in September. "This poem begins with the memory of a dividing wall, which Celan had seen during a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair (1967)

On it, a large reticulated portrait by Freud: "Blind wall in spite of light ". Freud appears in the image of Frankfurt with a beard lit like that of a patriarch or like that of the Jew portrayed by Rembrand.

He Abraham or Jacob "of this time" << ... does what he can and in any case is not useless: he interprets residues, displacements, condensations and twisted dreams. He does not have the full, revelatory, salvific word of the true patriarchs, but interprets the babbling incongruities of the unconscious and madness, where the Otherness has retracted,which once expressed itself in the symbols and words of the Sacred.

However, the light that illuminates the beard of the modern patriarch coexists with the blindness attributed to his image, an attribute that in an ambivalent way can mean inner clairvoyance or insuperable limitation: he can refer to Homer or Oedipus ... >>, writes philosopher Mario Pezzella. https://www.consecutio.org/2014/05/la-luce-minima-a-partire-da-due-poesie-di-p-celan/

In the second stanza of "Frankfurt September" the front of Freud looks like a lattice of complaints, << ... presumably coming from the darkness of Acheron, in which he, like Celan himself, dared to go forward. That is where the danger of feeling comes from blinded, from there act the disturbing powers that can take possession of the Ego and inflate it up tothresholds of self-destruction .... The light that illuminates the Freudian beard and paradoxically can lead to the risk of blinding, comes from "a dream of cockchafers "....

... Here we concisely allude to some pages of Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams, dedicated to the dream of a patient in which a background of violence and disturbing aggressiveness emerges: one of the most explicit and sinister announcements of what Freud will later call death drive. The content of the dream reveals a disruptive sado-masochistic sexuality. The masochistic element emerges first: the beetles are torn off their wings and this cruelty refers the patient to her unhappy marriage which she judges as an unhappy prison, a violence - we could say - that tears at the wings of life (the patient is after all born in May and her marriage took place in May) >>.