Freud began collecting Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities in the 1890s. In this lithograph, he is shown in 1914 at his desk, surrounded by about a dozen figurines. When he began collecting, he also began making an analogy between archeology and psychoanalysis, both reconstructions of the past from buried fragments: “Thus it came about, that in this, the first full-length analysis of hysteria undertaken by me, that I arrived at a procedure . . . of clearing away psychological material layer by layer, and we like to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city” (“Studies in Hysteria,” 1895).
image 2. Freud’s desk in Vienna, his antiquities arranged like an audience, 1938, photograph by Edmund Engelman. This photograph of Freud’s desk was taken near the end of his life, on the eve of his departure from Vienna for London. He wrote by hand, and the large leather folder holds manuscript pages.
image 3. Freud’s desk in London, where it is preserved today. Freud’s collection was shipped from Vienna and reassembled in London, where Freud died in exile in 1939. Taken from Freud’s point of view, we see that he has arranged the figures like an audience. He didn’t write for the narrowminded, anti-Semitic medical community in Vienna, but for the ages: for the Chinese scholar, for Imhotep, god of the underworld, for Isis, whose devotion and determination made her unstoppable, for Ptah, who created the world by word alone, and for Oedipus, who answered the riddle.
image 4. Scholar’s Screen, Chinese, Qing Dynasty, 19th century, rosewood and jade. Although Freud did not collect Asian objects (they were given to him as gifts), he placed them prominently in his study. This screen, featuring a jade carving of a scholar, is at the center of his desk, in back of the small bronze statute of Athena.
image 5. Head of Osiris, Egyptian, 1075-716 B.C., or later bronze; and image 6. Isis Suckling the Infant Horus, Egyptian, Late Period (26th Dynasty), 664-525 B.C., bronze. A legendary ruler of Egypt, Osiris was married to Isis. Osiris was killed by his jealous brother Seth, who dismembered the body and scattered the pieces along the Nile. Enraged, Isis gathered up the pieces of her husband, reassembled them into the first mummy, with whom she magically conceived a son. Isis raised little Horus to avenge the death of his father. For Freud, such stories were retold because they capture the essence of human emotions: love, jealously, sibling rivalry, devotion, marital fidelity, and revenge.
One of Freud’s first acquisitions, Baboon of Thoth sat in a prominent corner of Freud’s desk. He combines a lowly animal deity and a sophisticated, intellectual Thoth, the god who invented hieroglyphs. As such, the Baboon of Thoth reminds us that, according to Freud, our animal passions underlie—provide the energy— driving our higher intellectual pursuits. The Baboon of Thoth was the judge in the Egyptian “weighing of the hearts” ceremony in which, during the embalming process, the heart of the deceased was put an a scale to determine—not whether the person was good or bad, ethical or evil—but whether they had told the truth.
Freud felt that the myth of Oedipus and the sphinx, as told by the playwright Sophocles, captured a stage in the development of every little boy: “I have found, in my own case too, being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood… If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex” (Freud to Fleiss, 1897). As such, Freud wanted to be like Oedipus and solve the riddle of the psyche, thereby dispelling the power of the pestilence that had settled on his patients’ lives. Following Darwin, Freud believed that humans were driven by paired animal passions: survival and reproduction, aggression and passion, Thanatos and Eros, death-wish and love-force. He compared the positive animal drive to Plato’s philosophical concept of love: “In its origin, function, and relations to sexual love, the Eros of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido, of psychoanalysis” (Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921). Like the androgynous Greek Eros in his collection, the psychoanalytic love-force can be passive or aggressive, with a male or female love object.
The patient would relax and free-associate, while the analyst, hidden from view, engaged in the “talking cure.” Above the analytic couch Freud hung a colorful print of the temple at Abu Simbel. With his sensitivity to the meaning of words, Freud may have appreciated that, this temple that penetrates deep into Mother Earth, has a name that translates “father symbol” (“abu” from Hebrew, “Simbel” from German).
Freud studied history, mythology, and archeology as a way of understanding his patients and the history enfolding in his lifetime, and today it is important for us, as educators, to teach the lessons of history. Throughout his long life, Freud continued making an analogy between archeology and psychoanalysis, even coming to feel that he, as an analyst, had a better chance to accurately reconstruct the past: “[The psychoanalyst’s] work of construction …resembles to a great extent an archeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or some ancient edifice. The two processes are in fact identical, except that the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is still alive” (“Constructions in Analysis,” 1937).
Lynn Gamwell (Writer, Professor, School of Visual Arts, New York)