The signet rings that united Freud’s secret society
SIGMUND FREUD’S secret committee met in Vienna on a spring afternoon in May 1913. The psychoanalysis movement which Freud had founded was at a turning point.
His theories about the subconscious were gaining widespread traction and the ranks of his supporters were growing. But he was also feuding with some of his most important disciples, including Carl Jung, and was anxious about losing control of the discipline he had created.
In Vienna, he summoned five of his closest followers to chart the future of their movement. During the gathering he presented each man with a signet ring containing an ancient gem carved with a scene from Greek mythology.
“Freud was thinking about how to build a new society and how to build a new idea,” said Morag Wilhelm, an assistant curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “The rings are a symbol of the loyalty he wanted from his followers and perhaps his fear that the idea of psychoanalysis would not survive.”
More than a hundred years after the Vienna summit, Ms Wilhelm is on a global search for the “crown jewels” of Freudianism: the rings of the secret committee and around 20 other rings Freud gave out over the course of his lifetime.
She has so far gathered six, which are on display together for the first time at the Israel Museum, alongside items from Freud’s antiques collection.
Freud was not a wealthy man, but in the heady early days of archaeology European collectors were able to purchase artefacts at relatively modest prices
In the weeks since the Freud of f the Rings exhibit opened in July, Ms Wilhelm has learned of three more rings in London and New York.
“They are in private hands and we are negotiating with the owners to try to get them here to the exhibition,” she told The Sunday Telegraph.
Her quest began in a museum storage room, where she was cataloguing a collection of signet rings. There she chanced upon a ring of gold and black glass engraved with the image Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
It belonged to Eva Rosenfeld, an Austrian psychoanalyst who was close with Freud’s family. Freud gave her the ring in 1930 as a present for her 38th birthday. Ms Wilhelm soon tracked down three more rings in London’s Freud Museum and two more in Vienna and New York.
The six rings are today on display in a dark room in Jerusalem, where carpeted walls are meant to evoke the study where Freud asked patients to lie back and describe their dreams and nightmares.
Unsurprisingly, experts believe Freud thought carefully about the symbolism of each ring before bestowing it. The dark red carnelian stone on his own ring is carved with the image of Zeus, the king of the Gods. It was a fitting symbol for a man who saw himself as the father of a movement to change the world.
One of the most intriguing rings belonged to Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian who was one of the members of the secret committee. Ferenczi was involved in a complicated love triangle, sleeping with a female patient as well as her daughter. Freud was fascinated by the affair and it is probably no coincidence that he gave Ferenczi a ring showing a bacchanal, a Roman festival of sexual lust and alcoholic excess.
Despite the Israel Museum’s best efforts, it is unlikely that all of the secret committee’s rings will ever be reunited. Two of them were stolen from the boots of cars, a coincidence so strange that some suspect an insurance scam. Max Eitingon, another secret committee member, is believed to have taken his ring to the grave when he was buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. The rings were meant to bind the “five holy knights of Freudianism” in loyalty to their leader. But Freud went on to have serious arguments with Ferenczi and other members m of the committee. Correspondence also shows that some of Freud’s lieutenants found the rings embarrassing and refused to wear them in public.