Norton Anthology: St. Augustine's Confessions

Like a colossus bestriding two worlds, Augustine stands as the last patristic and the first medieval father of Western Christianity. He gathered together and conserved all the main motifs of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Ambrose; he appropriated the heritage of Nicene orthodoxy; he was a Chalcedonian before Chalcedon--and he drew all this into an unsystematic synthesis which is still our best mirror of the heart and mind of the Christian community in the Roman Empire. More than this, he freely received and deliberately reconsecrated the religious philosophy of the Greco-Roman world to a new apologetic use in maintaining the intelligibility of the Christian proclamation. Yet, even in his role as summator of tradition, he was no mere eclectic. The centre of his "system" is in the Holy Scriptures, as they ordered and moved his heart and mind. It was in Scripture that, first and last, Augustine found the focus of his religious authority. (American Psychiatric Association pp.26-35)

In “A Psychoanalytic Study of the Confessions of St. Augustine,” Charles Kligerman (1957) notes that young Augustine “was strongly moved by the story of Aeneas and Dido,” and goes on to state that “It is my thesis that this story contains the nuclear conflict of Augustine's infantile neurosis and played a most decisive role in his subsequent career” (pp. 99-100). The story “gives us a clue that an important unconscious conflict lies concealed,” and it is “a well-known observation that often the first story, fairy tale or the like that one recalls from childhood has the same significance as a screen memory” (p. 99; Freud [pp. 62-73] has an account of his own screen memory involving his mother's absence during pregnancies). Augustine recounts this story just four short chapters after he relates the beatings he suffered at the hands of his teachers.

Kligerman presents Augustine as a wandering Aeneas throughout his article, but especially notes the occasion when Augustine left Carthage and set off, alone, for Rome, using the same trickery against Monica that Aeneas, who also left Carthage for Italy, used against Dido. Dido, realizing that she had been betrayed, stabbed herself. But Monica took it upon herself to fashion a different ending, and she contrived to follow her son to Rome. Kligerman notes that even as she could not let her son go, he fell ill when he arrived in Rome, and probably “regarded this illness as a ...