The allure of ancient artifacts has long intrigued more than just archaeologists and Biblical scholars. Even renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a fascination for them. In The Age of Insight, Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel describes Freud’s keen interest in collecting antiquities.1
[Freud’s] new-found passion was fueled by his early fascination with the past, with myths and with archaeology … Freud recognized parallels between the work of a psychotherapist and that of an archaeologist and even used archaeological metaphors to formulate psychoanalytic ideas. As he explained to one of his early patients, the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff): “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”
The allure of ancient artifacts has long intrigued more than just archaeologists and Biblical scholars. Even renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a fascination for them. In The Age of Insight, Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel describes Freud’s keen interest in collecting antiquities.1 [Freud’s] new-found passion was fueled by his early fascination with the past, with myths and with archaeology … Freud recognized parallels between the work of a psychotherapist and that of an archaeologist and even used archaeological metaphors to formulate psychoanalytic ideas. As he explained to one of his early patients, the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff): “The […]
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