Freud

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In an 1896 lecture on the causes of hysteria, Sigmund Freud provided his audience with an elaborate archaeological analogy:

“Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live 016in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur! [The stones speak!]”¹

Once an archaeologist reconstructs a site and deciphers the inscriptions, Freud suggested, the ancient stones begin to tell their story. Similarly, the psychoanalyst probes through details of memory, meticulously sorting out biographical strata. Dream images, hysterical symptoms, inexplicable aversions and phobias must be “translated” and understood with reference to their causes—the repressed desires and traumas of the person’s life. The 40-year-old Freud’s psycho-archaeological motto might well have been The symptoms speak!

Although Freud’s thought evolved over the years, he continually returned to archaeology as a source of ideas and images. In one of his last technical papers, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), he wrote that the psychoanalyst has a tremendous advantage over the archaeologist: Whereas archaeological sites decay over time—inscriptions fade and become illegible; artifacts and architectural elements are destroyed by the elements or plundered by looters—psychological “sites” remain intact. In probing the minds of his patients, Freud wrote,

We are regularly met by a situation which in archaeology occurs only in such rare circumstances as those of Pompeii or of the tomb of Tutankhamen. All of the essentials are preserved, even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any psychical structure can really be the victim of total destruction. It depends only upon analytic technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is concealed completely to light.²

For Freud, however, the connection between archaeology and psychoanalysis was not limited to analogies and imagery. He believed that his science of the mind could be used to explore and reconstruct the ancient past as well as his patients’ own life histories. The images in our dreams are “mental antiquities,” he wrote:

[D]reaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him. Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood—a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual’s development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life. We can guess how much to the point is Nietzsche’s assertion that in dreams “some primeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path;” and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.³

Freud was introduced to the classical world while still a schoolboy in Vienna, and he remained actively interested in things Egyptian, Greek and Roman throughout his life. So profound was the spell antiquity cast over him, in fact, that classical terms and images persistently found their way into his most original and controversial work—such as the Oedipus complex and the theory of the instinctual conflict between Eros and Thanatos (Love and Death).^a

An even more prevalent influence, however, was archaeology. From Freud’s earliest studies on hysteria to his last papers on psychoanalytic technique, archaeological excavations and finds 018provided him with his most fertile source of images and metaphors. As the founder of a new “science,” Freud needed to describe a strange new methodology based on free association. In the act of excavation and the kinds of results it produced, he found a compelling paradigm. If archaeologists dug down into the earth, he dug down into the mind.

Why did archaeology impress itself so strongly on Freud? Part of the answer is that Freud and archaeology came to professional maturity around the same time. While Freud attended the University of Vienna (1873–1881), eventually to take a medical degree, archaeology was just beginning to acquire an academic presence. The first chair in archaeology at the University of Vienna was created in 1869. The Archaeological and Epigraphical Seminar of the University of Vienna was founded in 1876 and soon became a powerhouse of interdisciplinary training and research. In 1897 the Austrian Archaeological Institute was established. When Freud arrived at the university, the Austrians were conducting excavations on the island of Samothrace (1873 and 1875). By the time he was finishing his seminal work, the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the Austrian Archaeological Institute was digging at Ephesus in Asia Minor (see Peter Scherrer, “Ephesus Uncovered: From Latrines to Libraries”). As we know from his article “Great is the Diana of the Ephesians” (1911), Freud maintained a keen interest in these excavations.

Freud also had an intimate connection to the growing field in the form of a lifelong friendship with Emanuel Löwy (1857–1938), a “forgotten pioneer” of archaeology who only recently has been rescued from undeserved oblivion.⁴ Like Freud, Löwy was the son of a Jewish businessman of 019modest means. He, too, studied at the University of Vienna, and his career shows what superb training the Archaeological and Epigraphical Seminar provided. In 1882, a year after Freud finished his medical studies, Löwy joined the Austrian expeditions to Turkey and Greece. Some two decades later, as Freud was developing his pioneering psychoanalytic technique, Löwy became the first full professor of archaeology and art history at the University of Rome—a remarkable achievement for a Jewish scholar, given the prejudices and politics of contemporaneous university life. Löwy wrote on a broad range of topics, from ancient sculpture and painting to problems of chronology and artistic theory. His teaching had broad influence in Italy, where he was hailed as a second Winckelmann.^b When Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, Löwy resigned and returned to Vienna, where he continued to teach.

Through Löwy, Freud had a privileged view of the archaeologist’s world. While still a professor in Rome, Löwy visited Freud at least once a year in Vienna, and he would keep his host up until three in the morning talking about ancient Rome and archaeology.⁵ Freud would have Löwy look over his latest acquisitions, as he was concerned about authenticating the antiquities he was constantly acquiring. Perhaps most importantly, Freud’s friendship with Löwy inspired comparisons between his own work and that of his friend. In a 1931 letter to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, for example, Freud wrote that a recent visit by Löwy suggested a metaphor for Zweig’s style:

I had long struggled to find an analogy for your method of working; yesterday it occurred to me at last, conjured up by the visit of a friend who is an epigrapher and archaeologist. It is a procedure as when one makes a “squeeze” from an inscription. Namely, one puts a wet piece of paper on the stone and forces the softened material to sink into the tiniest depression on the written surface.⁶

Another archaeological personality had a powerful effect on Freud: Heinrich Schliemann. The first excavations at Troy were undertaken as Freud was finishing high school in the 1870s; later Freud read Schliemann’s Ilios (1881) as he wrestled with writing the Interpretation of Dreams. In 1899, as he was in the early stages of developing psychoanalysis, he wrote excitedly to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess about his progress with a patient:

Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period (before twenty-two months) which meets all the requirements and in which all the remaining puzzles converge. It is everything at the same time—sexual, innocent, natural, and the rest. I scarcely dare to believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.⁷

Freud appears to have identified strongly with Schliemann. Just as Schliemann astounded the world by revealing the material splendor of the Greek Bronze Age at Troy and Mycenae, psychoanalysis was to excavate the vast realms of the unconscious—eliciting even more astonishment, and not a little horror. Freud, who once defined himself as a conquistador and adventurer, could easily see himself as a “Schliemann of the mind.”

There is one clear instance in Freud’s letters where Schliemann represents a kind of ideal of human contentment. In an 1899 letter, Freud tells Fliess that he 022has just read Ilios, Schliemann’s account of his discovery of Troy and the so-called Priam’s Treasure. He then observes:

[Schliemann] was happy when he found Priam’s treasure, because happiness comes only with the fulfillment of a childhood wish. This reminds me that I shall not go to Italy this year. Until next time!⁸

This idea that “happiness comes only with the fulfillment of a childhood wish” is a recurring motif in Freud’s thought. In this case, however, Freud’s readiness to take Schliemann at his word was also a form of wish fulfillment—for the evidence now suggests that Schliemann gave little or no thought to Troy until he was in his mid-40s.^c Nor is it accidental, as psychoanalysts like to say, that Freud should shift suddenly to Italy in the letter; he yearned to visit Rome, yet a peculiar aversion kept him away from the Eternal City until 1901. This “Rome complex” was later analyzed as a psychological manifestation of his conflict with his father (and with anti-Semitism). A similar conflict arose when Freud briefly visited Athens in 1904. While atop the Acropolis, he had a strange sensation: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school.” This reaction puzzled him for 30 years, until he analyzed the episode: He felt guilt for going farther in life than his father (a humble Jewish businessman for whom Athens would have meant nothing), and this guilt caused him to doubt the existence of Athens itself. When Freud finally visited Athens, he felt a strange mixture of joy and guilt.⁹ Thus Schliemann’s worldly success and happiness reminded Freud of his own frustrations in excavating what he despairingly called the “dung heap” of his own unconscious.

Many other archaeologists found a home in Freud’s library. In fact, the evolution of archaeology in Egypt, Greece, Italy and the Near East can be traced by the books on his shelves: Ernest Wallis Budge’s Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (1902), Wilhelm Dörpfeld’s Troja und Ilion (1902), James Breasted’s History of Egypt (1905) and Dawn of Conscience (1933), William Flinders Petrie’s Amulets (1914), Howard Carter’s The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen (1923) and Arthur Evans’s Palace of Minos (four volumes, 1921–1935). Freud also owned Schliemann’s Mykenae (1878), Ilios (1880) and Tiryns (1885), along with virtually all of Löwy’s publications on classical art and archaeology.

In 19th-century Vienna, a growing middle class increasingly had access to large collections of antiquities that had formerly been the private possessions of Hapsburg emperors. Freud could—and did—view these works of ancient art in the Lower Belvedere, an Austrian imperial palace that was turned into a public museum. When Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse was planned, a magnificent museum was included in the design: the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum, which was inaugurated in 1891 and today houses one of the world’s most magnificent collections of art and antiquities. Freud frequently consulted the staff of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for authentication of his acquisitions, and one of the museum’s curators, Ernst Kris, became an adherent of psychoanalysis. Kris later wrote some seminal psychoanalytic studies on the art of the insane and related topics.¹⁰

Freud avidly visited museums in Berlin, London, Paris and Rome. In preparation for his trip to America in 1909, he read up on ancient Cyprus instead of American culture, knowing that the Metropolitan Museum in New York had the world’s best collection of Cypriot art.^d An 1885 letter to his fiancée describing his impressions of the Louvre is remarkable in its foreshadowing of the dream imagery that would become the mainstay of his new “science” of the mind:

Yesterday I went to the Louvre—at least, to the antiquities wing, which contains an incredible number of Greek and Roman statues, gravestones, inscriptions, and relics. I saw a few wonderful things, ancient gods represented over and over again, as well as the famous Venus de Milo … For me these things have more historical than aesthetic interest. What attracted me most was the large number of emperors’ busts, some of them excellent characterizations … I just had time for a fleeting glance at the Assyrian and Egyptian rooms, which I must visit again several times. There were Assyrian Kings—tall as trees and holding lions for lapdogs in their arms, winged human animals with beautifully dressed hair, cuneiform inscriptions as 023clear as if they had been done yesterday, and then Egyptian bas-reliefs decorated in fiery colors, veritable colossi of Kings, real sphinxes,—a dreamlike world.¹¹

Not only was antiquities collecting one of Freud’s great passions, it was also enmeshed in his working life and his relationships with other members of the psychoanalytic movement. For example, Freud and the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi arranged to finance excavations by a poor amateur excavator in Duna Pentele (now Dunaújváros, Hungary), where an ancient Roman military camp had been discovered. The results were modest—the excavator mostly collected things the peasants dug up, perhaps keeping the best finds for himself—but the news of this expedition is interspersed among the businesslike correspondence of the two analysts.¹² Freud liked to give such things as ancient clay lamps and, especially, rings as gifts. In 1913, when fellow psychoanalysts Carl Jung and Alfred Adler defected from the Freud camp, a “secret committee” was formed to direct the course of psychoanalysis and protect it from further dissension. Freud presented the members of this committee with ancient intaglio rings as a symbol of trust and unity. Freud’s adoring colleagues and analysands (those who undergo psychoanalysis) also knew that the way to his heart was through antiquities. Marie Bonaparte (Princess George of Greece, the granddaughter of Napoleon’s brother Lucien), for example, became an adherent of psychoanalysis late in Freud’s life and regularly brought him antiquities from Athens and Paris. She was later instrumental in securing the Freuds’ safe relocation to London in 1938, after Austria’s annexation by Hitler. Bonaparte personally smuggled out Freud’s favorite antiquity, a bronze statuette of Athena, which she returned to him on his way to London. She also gave him a red-figured krater, in which his ashes now rest in a grave outside London.

A series of photographs taken by Edmund Engelman in 1938 shows Freud’s home and office before the family left for England (see photos of Freud’s home and office). Freud’s collection of antiquities, arrayed on either side of his famous couch, filled cases and covered walls in his consulting room. On one side of the couch hung a plaster copy of the Gradiva, a Roman relief sculpture depicting a girl stepping along while holding up her dress (see photo of the Gradiva). This relief, now in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican, is the subject of a 1903 novella, also entitled Gradiva, by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen. Freud analyzed Jensen’s story in an essay called “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), which is one of the classics of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Next to the Gradiva in the consulting room was a reproduction of Ingres’s painting Oedipus and the Sphinx—a reminder of the Oedipus complex, the riddle of human development Freud claimed to have solved. Over Freud’s couch was a colored print of the great temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, next to which hung a portrait from Roman Egypt and some fragments of wall paintings (including sphinx figures).

In Freud’s study, cases of ancient objects stood before his overstuffed bookcases. Perhaps most strikingly, a chorus of figurines lined his writing desk—his silent audience and witnesses. A portrait by Max Pollack from 1914 best captures the sense of probing adventure experienced by Freud in this desktop theater of his own making. The American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), one of his patients, quoted Freud as remarking that his “little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether.”¹³ Analysands often remarked upon the museum-like quality of Freud’s study and consulting room. Some even reported that 024he would use objects from his collection to illustrate a point about the unconscious.

Archaeological artifacts were deeply woven into the fabric of Freud’s life and appear in crucial ways at various junctures in his writings. In the Interpretation of Dreams, he uses one of his own dreams—in which he drank out of an Etruscan cinerary urn (the liquid had the salty taste of ashes)—as an example of how dreams are instances of wish fulfillment. While sleeping he became thirsty, Freud writes, and this thirst somehow became connected to an ancient vase he had regretfully given away. The dream condensed two of Freud’s wishes, to quench his thirst and recover the beloved artifact, into one dream-act: He drank from the missing vessel.

In later editions of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud included a discussion of a theory of one of his followers, Paul Federn, in which dreams of flying are dreams about having an erection. Freud wrote: “[T]he remarkable phenomenon of erection, around which the human imagination has constantly played, cannot fail to be impressive,” since it involves “an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity.” He then added his own aside: “Cf. in this connection the winged phalli of the ancients.”¹⁴ Such winged phallic artifacts, Freud thought, corroborate the interpretation of the dream symbol (flying = erection) and suggest that it is universal (though here Freud’s reasoning is circular). Similarly, Freud puzzled over a persistent image in the mind of one of his patients, who saw his own father as a belly with a face on it. Freud thought he had found a clear parallel when he learned about the Baubo figurines—which also depict a belly with a face—associated with the ancient Greek cult of Demeter.¹⁵ Once again, he concluded that such symbolism must be a universal psychic phenomenon, though he was uncertain of its meaning.

Freud and his followers also applied psychoanalysis to explain a dizzying number of cultural and historical phenomena. Freud himself wrote an anthropological study, Totem and Taboo (1913). This was an attempt to explain the development of social prohibitions, including the universal taboo on incest. Freud gives a grisly account of a “primal horde” of human beings tyrannized by a cruel father, who took for himself all the women and chased off all the 025sons. This led the sons to attack and kill the father, whom they also devoured. From the guilt generated by this primal parricide, Freud argues, comes the psychological complex that creates “the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art.”¹⁶

Totem and Taboo is, as Freud was aware, an audacious, even outrageous, book. Even so, he insisted on the historical truth of the primal horde, at times to the discomfort of his own followers. Late in life, Freud made another foray into the human past—in Moses and Monotheism (1938). In this book, Freud argues that Judaism was the invention of an Egyptian of aristocratic birth, the biblical Moses, who professed Akhenaten’s monotheistic Aten cult.^e The noble Moses embraced the Israelites—formerly an enslaved and otherwise insignificant people—and gave them this cult. Later these people rebelled, killed Moses and then lapsed once again into polytheism. Over the generations, their repressed guilt compelled them to return to the monotheism of Moses, which resulted in monotheistic Judaism. Freud was completely serious about this historical thesis. He even made inquiries through a friend living in Palestine about the excavations at Tell el-Amarna, the site of the ancient capital of the “heretic king” Akhenaten, where he was hoping to find evidence that would bolster his theory of the Egyptian Moses.¹⁷

Like the archaeologists, Freud believed he could reveal layers of human experience with which men and women were no longer in touch. He believed psychoanalysis could recover these lost worlds. The treasures of the unconscious lay waiting for a Schliemann of the mind—and he was happy to play the part.

In an 1896 lecture on the causes of hysteria, Sigmund Freud provided his audience with an elaborate archaeological analogy: “Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live 016in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then […]