Below the Acheron, which Freud had promised to stir up in the epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, lies the region of blind germinations, the vast inorganic silence that is sometimes broken by improbable life: Freud reached this fathomless place, well “beyond the pleasure principle,” immediately after the end of World War I.³⁵⁴ But what was driving him to question “twenty-five years of intense work,” and, above all, using theories that could easily be considered “mystical,” blending them with the libidinal opprobrium of his treacherous son, C. G. Jung?³⁵⁵ What was still so deeply troubling the psyche of Sigmund Freud, the man who had the peculiar quality of recapitulating the whole of Western history in each of his moments of anxiety? It was repetition. With the perfect candor that, along with his “intellectual impartiality” in describing the “ultimate things,” makes him the only analyst who succeeded through his work in raising himself to the sacrificial status of Patient, Freud tells us: “Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot sunny afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt.^{356, 357} Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.” Freud then moves on to a second example, where the guile of “involuntary repetition” appears even more uncanny, since it takes the form of pure chance, of a coincidence that is found in the world without even requiring the ambivalent collaboration of the subject wandering aimlessly in a foreign land.³⁵⁸ And here Freud, as on so many other occasions, fails to tell us he is referring to a personal experience: “We of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62.³⁵⁹ But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures. We do feel this to be ‘uncanny,’ and unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.”