Sigmund
Freud and Archaeology
By
Hannah Grigorian and Nick Martin
Sigmund
Freud was an avid collector of archeological artifacts. This is obvious from a mere
glance around his home. Upon first inspection during our visit to Sigmund Freud’s
final home his interest in archaeology was clear from the artifacts in every
corner of his office and connections to Egyptology in his dream analyses. He
was always trying to connect humans across cultures in order to delve into the
human psyche. In fact, he even gained inspiration from them and used his
artifacts as reference tools while psychoanalyzing his patients. Within his
talk therapy he would use them as visual distractors for the patients he
treated. While they could not see him they could focus on the other figures. Freud
used the artifacts as a metaphor for his work. He compared psychoanalysis to
anthropology is the sense that he was always digging through minds, searching
for the little pieces he could salvage to try and put together a puzzle of
subconscious information. For Freud, gathering the pieces of one’s mind takes a
long time, much like gathering a collection of artifacts. Overall Freud
appreciated the anthropological methods and compared them to his work in sense
that he would work with elements of surface and depth, past and present,
manifest and latent, adult and infantile, and hidden and revealed. Freud once claimed that he had read wore
anthropological works than psychological ones.
He also used
archeological terms in his writings; he was heavily influenced by the science
in that he understood the mind in a way that he was aiming to discover
something hidden deep beneath the surface. Freud commonly used the anthropology
metaphor, in his work, to his patients in order to explain the techniques he
used, and to his family and friends. Notably, Freud was a literary critic when
it came to archaeology. He published “Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” in
1907. In it, he psychoanalyzed Wilhelm Jensen’s novel in which an archaeologist
falls in love with a walking woman portrayed in bas-relief that he later name
Gradiva and in a dreamlike state realizes it is his childhood sweetheart Zoe. Freud
used the book to outline the neurotic symptoms present and how these could be
helped with the aid of psychoanalysis. In his work he outlines the delusions
within Gradiva and how these can be mimicked in everyday life. Archaeology, in
this case, allowed Freud to bring psychoanalysis more toward the public with
this connection to a popular, fictitious work and this was, as we said, just
one of the many outlets archaeology provided for him. It maintained a dominant
force in his written work and within his psychoanalyses.
Below you
can see one of our own artifacts, a small Sigmund Freud replica, sitting on the
sign of Sigmund Freud’s final home which was the inspiration for this blog post
as well as a link to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Austria which came highly
recommended by our guide. Despite Freud’s final home being in London with most
of his home relics, he lived in Vienna, before fleeing the Nazis, in the
apartment where the museum lies.
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