Richard H. Armstrong
Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies
Department of Modern and Classical Languages
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3784

richarda@bayou.uh.edu
 

The Archaeology of Freud’s Archaeology: Recent Work in the History of Psychoanalysis.
 

Review of (inter alia):

"Meine...alten und dreckigen Götter": Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung. [My...Old and Filthy Gods": From Sigmund Freud’s Collection.] Edited by Lydia Marinelli. Frankfurt/Main: Stroemfeld, 1998. Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Freud Museum, Vienna, Nov. 18, 1998-Feb. 17, 1999. (Published only in German. Available directly from the Freud Museum, freud-museum@t0.or.at)

    At the busy crossroads of Freud’s private life, his analytical practice, his theoretical writings, his public ambitions for the new "science" of psychoanalysis, and his beloved travels lay a consuming passion for archaeology. While this has never been a secret (Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld produced an article on it back in 1951), its true significance for understanding psychoanalysis vis-à-vis other aspects of Modernism has been realized relatively late in the reception of Freud’s works. The present exhibition in Vienna is the latest installment in an ongoing and wide-ranging excavation of the site of Freud’s archaeological interests, and the essays in the catalogue offer a number of important insights of interest to scholars of European Modernism. The restricted focus of this exhibition is very different from that of the broader Freud: Conflict and Culture, originally at the Library of Congress and now at the Jewish Museum in New York, which showcases the manuscript collection amassed and housed in the Library of Congress and deals more generally with the controversial impact of Freud on the 20th century.

    It must be said from the start that the basic contour of this Viennese exhibition is not new. The first major endeavor of this type was the exhibition The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past, which opened in Philadelphia in 1989, and for which the very important catalogue Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities was produced. This was the first major public appraisal of his antiquities collection, now almost entirely located in the house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead where Freud lived the last year of his life, which is now the London Freud Museum (see the new guidebook listed below). That first catalogue included essays by Peter Gay, Donald Kuspit, Ellen Handler Spitz, and Martin Bergmann, along with a partial listing of the books on archaeological topics still in the library at Maresfield Gardens. (A complete catalogue of the Freud library is forthcoming, edited by Keith Davies and Professor Gerhard Fichtner). This first exhibition traveled to 12 cities in the USA between 1989 and 1992, and its tour inspired a second volume, Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquities, a more academic publication with somewhat harder-hitting essays than the exhibition catalogue could venture. In 1993, a similar exhibition at the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels produced the volume Le Sphinx de Vienne, which contains much more visual material but fewer essays. Finally, yet another exhibition of Freud’s antiquities was put on in Tokyo in 1996 at the Mikazuki Gallery, which spawned the modest catalogue Freud as Collector and a website, where one can still see high quality photographs of selected artifacts on-line.

    Besides these exhibitions, it is worth noting other publications germane to the topic of Freud and his archaeological interests that have appeared since 1989. Archaeologists continue to pick through the actual artifacts, and their publications tend to go toward specialized journals and presses (e.g., Sliwa). Anna Lucia D’Agata’s 1994 article treats in detail Freud’s Mycenaean and Cypriote items—solid reminders of his admired Schliemann, another maverick discoverer—but she also discusses his overall awareness of the dynamic field of Bronze Age archaeology over the course of his own intellectual development. Also in 1994, Robin Mitchell-Boyask analyzed Freud’s reading of classical literature and scholarship, based on his remaining library in London. Christfried Tögel’s Berggasse—Pompeji und Zurück of 1989 traces admirably the connections between Freud’s travels ("journeys into the past," as Tögel subtitles the book) and his archaeological interests, and contains a wealth of important biographical information and intelligent discussion. Tögel and Michael Molnar of the London museum are presently editing a German edition of Freud’s travel letters (no English edition is planned), including his musings from Italy and Greece. And finally, Freuds pompejanische Muse of 1996 addresses the background to Freud’s famous study of Wilhelm Jensen’s archaeological romance Gradiva, which remains a central text for Freud’s psycho-literary methodology.

    So this new exhibition in Vienna travels some well-covered territory by this time, and yet it offers new insights which the Viennese Freud Museum is in a position to provide. The Viennese museum suffers from the embarrassment that all the good Freudian artifacts have their permanent home in London, where they can always be seen in situ more or less as Freud left them. The many statuettes that lay on his desk—his private audience—remain patiently there, conserving in some way the ghostly presence of their owner. The London museum’s director, Erica Davies, has wisely seen that this collection inspires more than historical curiosity, and has endeavored to make the London museum a real cultural center, with art exhibits and events. But the Viennese Museum offers little more on the surface than the hollowed ground of Berggasse 19, where Freud lived for over 50 years—but even the famous couch is not there! It suffers, then, from a curious absence of things, and is mostly stuffed with reproduced images—notably the famous Engelman photographs that document the mental workshop/museum of the Moses of Modernism at the very moment of its dissolution under the Nazi menace. In a sense, the Vienna Museum could be read as a postmodern joke on the very idea of a Freud Museum. But it has made up for its lack of exhibitable objects by developing a large research library, and by becoming a center for the serious study of Freud’s life and work, very importantly located in the city where he lived almost his entire life. This has led to important exhibitions and publications, like their 1995 exhibition on the International Psychoanalytic Press.

    The co-operation between the London and Vienna Freud Museums has given us the best of both worlds in this catalogue. Many of the artifacts presented in color photographs are the same ones as in the other catalogues, and include Freud’s favorite object, a Roman Pallas Athena in bronze which he mistook for a 5th-century Greek original (see the comical scene in H. D.’s Tribute to Freud, where he tells her, "She is perfect [...] only she has lost her spear!" [69]). But the catalogue includes other items that have received less attention; more Asian artifacts are included, as well as the medieval menorah that is one of the very few artifacts of Jewish culture in his collection. This catalogue also includes a sketchy inventory of the 80 objects permanently housed in Vienna, which Anna Freud graciously donated to the fledgling museum along with other personal belongings in 1971. The archival photographs included are by now the standard ones that depict Freud among his collection, and the bibliography from Freud’s library is pretty much the same as in the previous catalogues. One cannot fault the organizers for repeating previously published material, since a visitor to a general exhibition cannot be supposed to know all that went before, and this is the first such catalogue in German.

    The new contribution of this volume is to be found in the eight essays written by authors with different sorts of expertise. Some of them are general in character, providing a basic overview of the topic of Freud’s collection and the various angles from which the activity of collecting—overdetermined as it undoubtedly is—can be understood in his case. Michael Molnar’s essay explores the theme of adventure and travel, now clearly recognized as organic to Freud’s collecting process. Andreas Mayer addresses a very important precedent in Freud’s life for his collecting passion: the various collections of his great teacher, Jean Martin Charcot, whose library impressed the young Freud as being very much a museum (and we must not forget that engraving of Charcot which Freud saw from his chair in his own consulting room—his former teacher was always before his eyes!).

    A particularly important contribution is made by Harald Wolf, who touches upon the two people who represent Freud’s living connection to the profession of archaeology. The more important of the two, Emanuel Löwy, was up to his death in 1938 Freud’s life-long friend, and one of the few people whom Freud addressed with the familiar Du. Löwy has been rediscovered lately as a "forgotten pioneer" in the field of archaeology (see Brein), and it is clear from Freud’s letters that his visits made a great impression on Freud. How could Freud not admire a man who, a Jew like himself, conquered all prejudices and obstacles to become the first professor of archaeology and art history at the University of Rome, and who had scores of devoted students, including Ernst Gombrich? Freud recalls in the Interpretation of Dreams the question: "Which of the two [...] walked up and down his study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome?Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, The Commander-in-Chief?" (4:196). While Freud confessed that he himself held a strong childhood identification with Hannibal, it is clear that Löwy was very much a Winckelmann, rising to fame through his erudition and artistic sensibility in the Eternal City—only unlike Winckelmann, Löwy did not have to convert to Roman Catholicism.

    Löwy’s visits clearly stimulated Freud’s mind at the level of metaphor, too, though Wolf does not delve into this as much. I have found a passage in a letter to Stefan Zweig which makes this very clear—and not even the editor of the Zweig-Freud correspondence understood who stands behind the metaphor in question. Writing to Zweig in 1925, Freud says he has at last found an adequate comparison for Zweig’s style of writing, which was suggested to him during "the visit of a friend, who is a epigrapher and archaeologist" (Zweig 134). Zweig’s complex mastery of detail is compared to the process of making a "squeeze" from an inscription; that is, one presses a wet sheet of paper into the face of the stone until it picks up every feature of the surface. There can be little doubt that it was Löwy who inspired Freud in this comparison, and this letter is the most direct evidence we have of a moment when Freud leaps into an analogy fresh from a discussion with a real archaeologist.

    Which brings us to the next, and for many, the most important topic addressed in these essays: what Donald Kuspit called in 1989 the "mighty metaphor" of archaeology within the discourse of psychoanalysis, which inspired Freud from his earliest studies of hysteria to his latest papers on analytical technique. Within psychoanalytic circles, the role of this metaphor became controversial in the 1980s through the extended critique launched by Donald Spence, who attacked the biases inherent in it from the standpoint of a postmodern understanding of narrative, truth, and history. Two essays by psychoanalysts address the issue in this book; August Ruhs discusses specifically the metaphorics of "depth" in "depth psychology," while Karl Stockreiter examines the broader issue of the archaeological analogy throughout Freud’s work, and tries to vindicate its heuristic value in the face of Spence’s critique. Stockreiter’s essay touches upon all of the most important "archaeological" passages in Freud’s writings, and traces Freud’s continual rethinking of the analogy until late in his life. Along with Kuspit’s 1989 essay, Stockreiter’s is an important point of departure for anyone concerned with the abiding productivity of the metaphor throughout Freud’s career. Those more interested in the debate begun by Spence should see the 1996 monograph by Wolfgang Mertens and Rolf Haubl, Der Psychoanalytiker als Archäologe, which responds to Spence in detail. The Anglophone world should also take note of the multifaceted studies of psychoanalytic metaphor undertaken in Metaphernanalyse, edited by Michael B. Buchholtz. This includes an essay by Spence on the "detective" analogy, which has a strong affinity with that of archaeology.

    The catalogue’s essays all have one flaw, which is simply that they are very short; this makes them feel more like flirtations than solid discussions of their topics. But that is the nature of an exhibition catalogue, and the bibliography provided in the notes will lead the reader in the right direction for further study. One helpful addition in this catalogue is the chronology of archaeological discoveries as reflected in Freud’s own library, which drives home once again the fact that Freud’s lifespan happened to coincide with archaeology’s coming of age as both an academic discipline and an imperialist adventure. When one considers that it was the hot new field at the university when he began his studies there—with a broad impact on the biological sciences as well through palaeontology—one realizes just why it left a lasting impression, reinforced over the years by his contacts in the profession, the many museums, antiquities dealers, and sites he visited, and the kind indulgence of his friends and colleagues. This handsomely designed book does an excellent job of giving the reader a nuanced and many-sided view of a major topic in Freud scholarship today, and should especially be ordered for art libraries. The exhibition in Vienna runs until February 17th, 1999.