THE ANNUAL

OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

A Publication of the

Institute for Psychoanalysis

Chicago

Volume XIX

~ THE ANALYTIC PRESS

1991 Hillsdale, NJ Hove and London
Copyright © 1991 by the Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago
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Published by the Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.

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 Exploring the Archaeological Metaphor: The

Egypt oj Freud's Imagination

LORELEIH.CORCORAN

Yes, I spent . . . two hours chatting with Einstein. . . . He is cheerful,

assured and likeable, and understands as much about psychology as I do about
physics, so we got on together very well.
- Sigmund Freud to Sandor Ferenczi
January 2, 1927.

As an Egyptologist, I admit to not really knowing very much about

Sigmund Freud or psychoanalysis. This situation is balanced, I believe,
because from what I have been able to gather, Freud - through no fault
of his own but, rather, owing to his personal interest and to the
circumstances of his time - did not know very much about Egyptology.
This being so, Freud was nevertheless successful in accumulating a great
number of portable antiquities from Egypt, a collection that should best
be examined in the context of the Victorian milieu in which it was
amassed - a lot of uptight people going about projecting all sorts of
mystery and romance onto the veiled lands of the Orient.
Related to this perplexing situation - that Freud appears to have had
little scholarly commitment to academic investigations into the history or
culture of ancient Egypt and that the same scientific discipline with which
he approached his psychoanalytic work was not a factor in his approach

This essay was first presented at a daylong symposium entitled "Sigmund Freud and
Art" held at the University of Chicago, May 5, 1990. The symposium was cosponsored
by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, and the
Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago, in conjunction with the exhibition "The Sigmund
Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past."

19
20 The Egypt of Freud's Imagination

to accumulating antiqUItIes - is the use by Freud of an intriguing

metaphor to which he steadfastly adhered - the likening of archaeological
technique to psychoanalysis . Except among psychoanalysts, however,
this archaeological metaphor does not seem to have survived with success.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever approached me at a party
and said, "Egyptology - isn't that a lot like psychoanalysis?" Perhaps the
fields went their separate ways, as Biblical archaeology and Egyptology
have done . At the turn of this century the promise of confirming the
Bible as a historical source was a principal motivating force behind many
archaeological missions, but (with the exception of Indiana Jones) no one
searches, consciously, anymore for proof of the Lost Ark or the Holy
Grail. I doubt, however, that even in Freud's time one would have been
well advised to liken his fledgling field to the practice of archaeology in
"an attempt to prejudice people in psychoanalysis's favor by associating it
with the special authority and appeal of archaeology" (Kuspit, 1989, p.
135) . At the turn of this century, archaeology itself was but a fledgling
field . Even now, 50 years after Freud's death, it would be difficult to find
an academic discipline that is accorded such little respect as archaeology;
it is only a happenstance of spelling that it ranks above architecture and
art history.
Whereas Freud should not be faulted for the limitations of the
discipline of Egyptology in the late 19th century (the basic principles of
Egyptian archaeology were, in fact, being formulated by Flinders Petrie,
the "father of Egyptian archaeology," at that very time), I hypothesize
that Freud, as one of the earliest European connoisseurs of things
Egyptian, was nevertheless not seriously committed to an academic
interest in Egyptology outside of his own narrowly personal commitment
to his object collection. This hypothesis is based on three observations:
first, his library; second, the quality and type of the objects he collected;
and, third, my knowledge of the history of archaeology as a modern
discipline.
As concerns his library, Freud defended his interest in the ancient
fields to the extent that he claimed to "actually have read more
archaeology than psychology" (Gay, 1989, p. 16, Botting and Davies,
1989, p. 184). Freud scholars have suspected this statement to be an
exaggeration (Botting and Davies, 1989, p . 184), although the average
person, looking over the great number of publications on ancient studies
in Freud's personal library (listed in the back of the catalog for the
exhibition "The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried
Past"), might object to their doubts. The question of whether Freud
actually read these books or whether they were merely additions to his
LORELEI H. CORCORAN 21

object collection can be answered by the fact that several volumes - for
example, a text by Brugsch (Botting and Davies, 1989, p. 188)­
contained margin notes, indicating that they were, indeed, read with
care. However, it is important to determine, first, what sort of books
these were and, second, when Freud stopped collecting them.
The compilers of the bibliography on the texts related to antiquities that
were in Freud's library politely describe the scope of the list as "eclectic"
(Botting and Davies, 1989, p. 185). Certainly, the Egyptology books in
Freud's library were primarily those books that would help a collector:
books on art, on the publication and discussion of small finds, on history,
and on language that would assist in the decipherment of inscribed
objects. Furthermore, if you check the copyright dates on these books,
you notice that the Egyptology books, for the most part, were all
purchased within the formative years of Freud's collecting; that is, the
most recent word on a subject was not what interested him. Contra
Botting and Davies (1989, p. 185), I conclude that Freud did not follow
the academic journals in the field. In fact, had he expressed a scholarly
commitment to Egyptian archaeology by joining one of the various
"archaeological societies" - such as the Egypt Exploration Fund, a British
society to which many foreigners, including Americans, subscribed-he
would not only have received publications and journal accounts of recent
excavations but, through his membership, would have been eligible to
receive a "subscription gift" comparable to our modern-day bonus gifts
offered to subscribers to public television stations. In those days, in lieu
of a tote bag or a T-shirt, you received a genuine ushebti (a clay, wood,
or stone figurine) or a pot, or a scarab-even a complete mummy if you
were in the big-money subscription categories. But instead of supporting
legitimate excavations, Freud aided the illicit digging of a Roman site in
central Hungary and paid an impoverished local farmer for the objects he
unearthed (Gamwell, 1989, p. 23 n. 14), thus in a very literal way
undermining the objectives of the young science of archaeology.
Concerning Freud's collection of objects, the figurines in general reveal
a frontality that conforms well to a distinguishing trait of ancient
Egyptian representation. In a recent show of art from the Ptolemaic
period, Bianchi (1988 , p. 62) characterized the sculptural products of
native Egyptian workshops by their frontal imagery. That is, if you look
at a Hellenistic stone portrait from the side, the personality of the
individual is still clearly apparent. If you look at an Egyptian stone
portrait from the side, the features and personality completely disappear.
This correspondence of ideals, form, and function (for Freud lined his
figurines up on his writing desk, facing him) might explain why the
22 The Egypt of Freud's Imagination

majority-22 of 35 (Raphael-Leff, 1990, pp. 313-315)1- of the most

favored figurines on Freud's writing desk and "almost half of his [entire]
collection," (Gamwell, 1989, p. 21) were in the traditionally frontal style
of ancient Egypt.
In addition to their frontality, I should like to draw attention to the
angularity of the objects in Freud's collection: sharp-edged figures of
metal, stone, and ceramic. Noteworthy, I think, for, as a colleague of
mine chided, "He might just as easily have fllled his office with soft,
fuzzy creatures." Although Freud kept two chows as pets, the only stuffed
creature that appears in some docuphotos of the arrangements on his
London desk is a cute, but bristly, hedgehog.
Leaving aside the question of whether there was such a thing as art in
ancient Egypt, I do not think it would be fair to represent the Egyptian
objects in Freud's collection as works of "art." Some of the pieces have
been identified as forgeries, probably purchased unknowingly by Freud,
who relied upon the expertise of a specialist at the nearby art museum to
authenticate his purchases (Gamwell; 1989, p. 23). I was surprised to
read that Dr. Hans Demel, director of the Egyptian and Oriental
collections at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, not only authenti­
cated objects for Freud but also for the dealers who sold to Freud
(Gamwell, 1989, p. 23 n. 16); in modern museum ethics, this would be
seen as a clear conflict of interest. It was, I read further, this same man
who then evaluated Freud's collection for release from the country after
Nazi occupation (Gamwell, 1989, p.23 n.16). Freud innocently des­
cribed the director's appraisal as "merciful" (Gay, 1989, pp. 15-16), a
characterization accepted by Gamwell (1989, p. 23 n. 16), but I suspect
that Demel was at this point being merely "accurate." Whereas the
authorities might have considered it expedient to permit the departure of
the elderly, ill, and world-renowned psychoanalyst, it seems highly
unlikely that a truly unique art treasure would have been allowed to leave
the country.
In response to Lynn Gamwell's assertion (1989, pp. 22-23) that the
objects in Freud's collection were undervalued in his lifetime in terms of
how much they have appreciated over the years, I would attribute any
monetary appreciation of these objects to the skyrocketing inflation of
prices in the art market of recent years and surely not to an increase in
the appreciation of their aesthetic value. Bettelheim (1990, pp. 22-23)
suggested that aesthetics was not a factor at all in Freud's collecting.
Rather, Bettelheim stressed the "archaeological" character of the Freud

'I thank Joan Raphael-LefT for her kindness in sending me a copy of her article in
manuscript form.
LORELEI H. CORCORAN 23

collection, although what he meant by "archaeological" is only that due to

their funerary use or other circumstances, the objects had once been
buried and had since been dug up. This is an overly simplistic definition
of the term "archaeological ," for, as James Henry Breasted (1920), the
first American Egyptologist, put it, "Archaeology is never just digging."
Most of the small pieces of the type in Freud's collection were
mass-produced in antiquity. Small bronzes such as the figure of Imhotep
(Inventory no. 3027; Gamwell and Wells, 1989, pp. 44-45) and wood,
stone, and clay ushebtis (such as Inventory nos. 3271, 3269, and 3351;
Gamwell and Wells, 1989, pp. 64-69) were .m anufactured by the
hundreds of thousands in ancient Egypt. To quo te John D. Cooney
(1965), Egyptologist and former curator of the Cleveland Museum of
Art:

The bronzes that clutter our museums are chiefly votive offerings of
late date made as a gift to a god with the clear expectation of receiving
a favor in return. Such pieces made for a religious or magical purpose
are often enough of considerable archaeological and historical interest
[and I would stress here that this applies only to those pieces that bear
inscriptions or have been discovered in controlled excavations] but
rarely do they possess any quality to justify calling them works of art
[po 100].
Freud's personal interest in these figures, however, probably tran­
scended their commonness. Stavros Aspropoulos (1989) concluded that
"Freud's collecting agenda was not governed by a desire to acquire fine
works of art, but was motivated by an ardent desire to accumulate objects
which , for Freud, embodied certain concepts important to his theories"
(p. 26).
Freud's fascination with the historic figure Imhotep might have come
from a familiarity with the deified man's history. It is most unusual in
ancient Egyptian art to be able to identify the name of an individual
artist, (Wilson, 1947; Gunter, 1990) and in fact most of the objects in
Freud's collection were made by anonymous artists . An exception from
ancient Egypt to this "rule of anonymity" is the identification of Imhotep
as the architect of the Step Pyramid of King Djoser at Sakkara.
Information about the name of the architect responsible for that impos­
ing stone structure and its surrounding complex comes to us from an
inscription on the base of a statue found near the entrance to the pyramid
complex. The fame of Imhotep increased throughout Egyptian history.
He became deified and worshipped as a god of science and healing. In
Greek times he was associated with Asclepius, and his healing powers
were considered to manifest themselves in dreams. The reason for the
24 The Egypt oj Freud's Imagination

affinity that Freud might have felt with this man of healing and
interpreter of dreams becomes apparent.
Most people unfamiliar with ancient Egypt consider the civilization to
have been obsessed with death, the Egyptians spending so much time
preparing tombs and tomb equipment. In fact, Egyptologists (Wilson,
1946, p. 98) insist the opposite is true-that the Egyptians were a gay and
lusty people who loved life too fully to surrender it in the face of death­
a balance of opposites Freud might have appreciated.
Clay, wood, and stone figurines were placed in ancient Egyptian tombs
by the hundreds. They are called ushebtis or shawabtis depending on
whether the term is considered to have derived from the verb wsb, which
means "to answer," or from a word used to describe a type of wood from
which some of these figurines were carved (Schneider, 1977, p. 138).
They were designed to substitute for the tomb owner should he be called
to work in the netherworld.
Some ushebti figures carry tools for agricultural labor - a hoe and a
seed sack - but the arms of Inventory no. 3269 are missing, as are his
feet. This feature is unusual among figurines in Freud's collection, since,
as Bernfeld (1951, pp. 111, 120-121) points out, Freud tended to prefer
intact figures. Schneider (1977, pp. 20, 25) discusses the dual function of
ushebtis such as this, wearing an elaborately pleated linen costume and
seemingly inappropriately dressed for the manual labor he would be
called upon to perform, as incorporating the roles of master and servant
within the same image. On the flared kilt is an inscription; the text is
from Spell 6 of the Book of the Dead, "A Spell for Causing an Ushebti
to do Work for a Man in the Realm of the Dead." Reeves (Gamwell and
Wells, 1989) gives a translation of the traditional spell:

Oh ushebti, allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to do

any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead; if indeed
obstacles are implanted for you therewith as a man at his duties, you
shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable the
fields, of flooding the banks, or of conveying sand from east to west;
"Here am I," you shall say [po 65].

Many of the pieces in Freud's collection were inscribed. His interest in

these inscriptions, according to Freud Museum researchers (Gamwell
and Wells, 1989, p. 75 note F. M.), might have come from his suggestion
of a parallel between the interpretation of dreams and the decipherment
of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Freud's
suggestion was, however, based on an incomplete understanding of the
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, the grammatical construc­
LORELEI H. CORCORAN 25

tions of which had just begun to be understood in Freud's day, after their
elementary decipherment by Champollion in 1822. Although, admitted­
ly, a highly visual script, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, we know now,
are not primarily pictographic, but phonetic.
Scholars (Gamwell and Wells, 1989, p. 67) note that Freud's special
interest in the text inscribed on ushebti Inventory no. 3269 appears to
have been in the palimpsest that occurs in the inscription. The name of
the individual for whom the ushebti was originally made was erased and
replaced by the name of another-Djehutymheb. 2 This usurpation of
materials was a common occurrence in ancient Egypt. Kings would
commandeer statues and whole temples by replacing the name of a
former king with their own. This practice is not presently viewed by
Egyptologists in a negative light, however; as Freud himself might have
appreciated, it is understood as an identification with tradition and the
continuity of past greatness.
Donald Kuspit (1989, p. 150) suggests that Freud used his antiquities
to reflect upon or to "question them about himself", as instruments of
self-analysis, Freud used them to "read his own prehistory." In that sense,
the collection of Sigmund Freud does not belong to an academic
archaeological tradition, for if it did, how could a forgery have spoken to
him as well as an authentic antiquity? Freud was concerned with this
problem himself when he asked, "What if we have shared the fate of so
many interpreters who have thought they saw quite clearly things which
the artist did not intend either consciously or unconsciously?" (Spitz,
1989, p. 153). Yet I believe that Freud fell victim to this very trap. In an
analysis of the Greek legend of Oedipus, Freud observed patterns of
experience with which he not only personally identified, but considered to
be universal in the life of every child (Gamwell and Wells, 1989, p. 95).
Yet if we are convinced by Kuspit's (1989, pp. 145-150) masterful
discussion of Spence that the observer is always a part of what is
observed, then relics of the past must always have two meanings: one
contemporary and one prehistoric.
This reminds me of an anecdote told among Egyptologists. A famous
Orientalist who had spent many years studying Egyptian religion entered
the office of an equally famous Egyptologist. The Orientalist sat down
and announced, "I know the Egyptian mind." The Egyptologist looked up
and said, "You don't even know your own wife's mind." Several months

2Upon inspection, there appears to be no reason to doubt that other alterations to the
figure (the painted arms and the addition of a painted wood head) were made at the same
time in antiquity that the name was changed.
26 The Egypt of Freud's Imagination

later, the Orientalist and his wife were divorced . If we have such
difficulty untangling our emotions in the present, how can we presume to
ever know what it was like to have lived the original meaning?
Scholars (Spitz, 1989, pp. 153-159; Gamwell, 1989, p. 21) have
suggested that Freud denied his J ewishness and that he collected antiq­
uities from classical lands because he had become an explorer in search of
a new heritage of choice to replace his own by birth. They point to an
episode in Freud's childhood in which he became embarrassed by his
father's unwillingness or inability to defend himself in the face of
humiliating discrimination and to Freud's desire to stand up to the crowd
to vindicate his father. In Freud's collection (Inventory no. 3037) is a
bronze statuette of the ancient Egyptian god Horus as a child with his
mother, Isis, in what might have appeared to Freud as "the privileged,
primary relationship between a mother and son" (Spitz, 1989, p. 158). In
ancient Egyptian mythology Horus was the son of Osiris. Osiris, king of
the gods, was murdered by his evil brother Seth. It was Horus's obligation
as a dutiful son to vindicate his father's death by destroying his evil uncle,
thereby regaining the throne of the gods. Like Spitz (1989), who suggests
that whereas "many pieces cannot be directly tied to written allusions, ...
deep currents bind the artifacts to the written texts" (pp. 154-155), we
could speculate concerning Freud's affinity to certain objects because of
their associations with Egyptian mythology. Freud might have identified
with the beloved, vindicated son Horus, or the myth might have
represented for him the resolution of the eternal continuum whereby the
son matures into the father, since the ancient Egyptians believed that the
living pharaoh was the Horus on earth but at death became Osiris ("the
son in this world, the father in the next" [Friedman, 1989, p. 38]).
However, as Joan Raphael-Leff (1990, pp. 309-310, p. 313) has pointed
out, whereas the majority of objects Freud collected were Egyptian, it
was principally the Greco-Roman mythology (specifically the myth of
Oedipus) that Freud developed in his theoretical work.
Freud's favorite piece was a tiny statuette of the goddess Athene
(Inventory no. 3007). A friend, a woman, smuggled the statuette out of
Nazi-occupied Vienna for him . Freud himself analyzed the image of
Athene, and Freud scholars (Gamwell and Wells, 1989, p. 110) have read
in this statuette his fascination with manly women. Unmentioned in the
literature, however, is an episode in the mythology of the grey-eyed
goddess that, I suggest, might have had special meaning for Freud. It is
the goddess Athene who in the opening lines of Homer's The Odyssey
exhorts the hero's son , Prince Telemachus, to go in search of his father,
Odysseus . Though Telemachus travels far in the world, father and son
are reconciled on their native ground only after Odysseus returns home.
LORELEI H. CORCORAN 27

The circumstances affirm the lesson of The Odyssey: "Where shall a man
find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents? In far lands he
shall not, though he find a house of gold" (Fitzgerald's 1963 translation of
Homer's The Odyssey, p. 146). Freud sought a new heritage in the palaces
at Troy and Knossos and in the gold of the treasure of Tutankhamen, but
he followed a tortuous path to the resolution of his personal conflicts.
Perhaps he might have fared better if he had heeded the words of
Odysseus or could have benefited from the simple philosophy of The
Wizard of Oz. After her long sojourn to the Emerald City, Dorothy Gale
is informed by the Good Witch of the North that she has "always had the
power to go back to Kansas ... [but] she had to learn it for herself."
"What have you learned, Dorothy?" asked the Tin Woodsman. "... If I
ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than
my own backyard because if it isn't there I never really lost it to begin
with ..." Dorothy replied. "There's no place like home" (Loews Incor­
porated, 1939). In the words of this century's great mythic storyteller,
Joseph Campbell, "Where we thought to travel outward, we shall find the
center of our own existence" (Campbell, 1988, p. 123).
If in the antiquities that Freud collected we see, as Kuspit suggests
(1989, p. 150), a reflection of the man himself, it is never more clear than
in the tempera "mummy portrait" (Inventory No. 4946) in his collection.
Comparing, for example, the panel portrait (Gamwell and Wells, 1989,
p. 79) with the image of Freud in the miniature photo of him with
Michelangelo's Dying Slave, taken circa 1905 (Gamwell and Wells, 1989,
p. 20), I was struck by the similarity between the man in the "mummy
portrait" and the visage of the great psychoanalyst. Freud might have
been aware of the controversy raging among German scholars over the
identification of the faces depicted in these portraits. Some scholars
(Ebers, 1893, pp. 24-27) thought these were portraits of Alexandrian
Jews, and in reference to a portrait from an Egyptian female mummy
Freud himself is known to have said that she had "a nice Jewish face"
(Bemfeld, 1951, p. 11 0). If the objects he collected were a mirror to his
own thoughts and ideas, perhaps Freud found in this "older" image of
himself some personal reconciliation.
And here I must interject a personal note: it was these portraits and the
mummies they embellished that formed the focus of my doctoral
dissertation at the University of Chicago (Corcoran, 1988). Freud's
"mummy portrait" (Inventory no. 4946) was purchased from a Viennese
art dealer named Theodor Graf. Parlasca recounts (1966, p. 24) how
Grafs men, in Egypt, procured hundreds of these paintings by literally
tearing them off the mummies to which they had belonged; in the
Egyptian Museum, Cairo (Inventory CG 33215), is a faceless mummy,
28 The Egypt oj Freud's Imagination

the victim, perhaps, of just such vandalism. Although, admittedly, these

mummy portraits were acquired by collectors because they could be
neatly framed and hung on a wall (who, after all, has the room or means
to conserve a whole, sometimes smelly mummy?), this separation of a
portrait from its mummy destroyed the physical and religious integrity of
the object and effectively destroyed its true "archaeological" significance,
an unfortunate consequence that Freud, through his purchase, actually
helped to encourage and support. 3
In terms of the archaeological metaphor, scholars would have us
believe that Freud sought in an association with the study of the past "a
wreath of ancient glory and legitimization in the face of an initial and
on-going spurning of his intellectual enterprises" (Spitz, 1989, p. 154).
Those of you who have followed the history of archaeology will recog­
nize, however, that the allegation that in Freud's lifetime "archaeology
had developed from mere antiquarianism or outright treasure hunting
and looting into a methodical and disciplined study" (Botting and Davies,
1989, p. 185) is simply not true; archaeology has emerged as a science
only in the last few decades of this century. The first truly scientific,
multidisciplinary archaeological field team - the hallmark of which is the
close cooperation in the Jield of archaeologists and natural scientists­
excavated under the direction of The Oriental Institute's Robert and
Linda Braidwood at Jarmo, Iraq, after the Second World War. In the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeology was a fledgling field
barely progressed beyond grave robbing. Archaeologists did not have the
expertise to answer the questions they were beginning to ask; nor did
philologists have enough command of the ancient Egyptian languages to
enable them to understand the complexities of ancient Egyptian law,
social practices, and religion. In terms of the classical languages, the
situation would have been different, the study of Greek and Latin having
reached cult proportions, but classical archaeology was certainly subject to
the same scrutiny as Egyptian archaeology . As Freud himself pointed
out, an analogy between archaeology and psychoanalysis leaves them
both open to the same "sources of errors":

Just as the archaeologist builds up the walls of a building from the

foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and
position of the columns from depressions in the floor, and reconstructs
the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the

3It is greatly to be regretted that a number of major museums in Europe and the
United States enhanced their collection of "mummy portraits" by purchase from the Graf
collection . See Thompson (1982, pp. 4-5).
LORELEI H. CORCORAN 29

debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from
fragments of memories [Kuspit, 1989, p. 138] .

Two examples from the careers of archaeologists Freud admired will

suffice to illustrate the errors to which reconstructions might fall victim
because of the limitations of available scientific data or the size of the
excavator's ego. The first is the so-called discovery of the city of Troy by
Heinrich Schliemann, the man, Peter Gay suggests, whom Freud
"probably envied more than any other" (Kuspit, 1989, p. 133), and
especially the discovery of the great, golden treasure that Schliemann is
alleged to have found in the palace of King Priam. Those of you who
watched the PBS presentation "In Search of the Trojan War" know that
the "jewels of Helen" are still the subject of controversy, that we know
that Schliemann greatly embellished the account of this find for effect,
and that the objects were not discovered as a hoard . If the jewelry was
not, in fact, planted, it was probably uncovered over several weeks' work
in various, scattered rooms (Wood, 1985, pp. 58-62). As for the
identification of the city of Homer's Troy, Schliemann himself admitted
confusion and uncertainty, baffled by the complexity of the stratigraphy
of the site (Wood, 1985, pp. 57, 62) . Driven by a desire to confirm the
authenticity of the Homeric epic, Schliemann moved on to Mycenae,
where he once again, as Michael Wood (1985) suggests, "found exactly
what he had wished so passionately to find" (p. 68). It is unlikely,
considering "the attacks of the Press in [nearby] Germany" (Wood, 1985,
p. 70), that Freud could have been unaware of the controversies that
surrounded the excavations at these sites and the rumors that circulated
accusing Schliemann of fabricating some of his most magnificent finds.
At Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans excavated the palace of Minos. The
fabulous frescoes that decorated the rooms of the palace were recon­
structed by Evans (1928, pp . 444-446) from fallen fragments. One
reconstruction, in particular, provides an embarrassingly painful re­
minder of one's limitations. Initially published by Evans (1921, pI. iv,
p.265) as the Saffron or Crocus Gatherer, this scene was first restored
with the body of a young male or, as an alternative suggested by the
litheness of the torso, a young girl. Parallel scenes and an understanding
of the saffron ritual in Minoan culture led to a revision of the original
reconstruction (Morgan, 1988, pp. 29-32, 39-40). I thank my friend
Kiley Mitchell, a senior at Lake Forest College, for help in clarifying this:
the lithe, blue torso is now discreetly accepted by this generation of art
students as that of a monkey. Less forgivable to future generations of
scholars trying to understand the historical development of the site is that
Evans, in an effort to advance his theory that the later periods at Knossos
30 The Egypt oj Freud's Imagination

were a time of decline, reinterpreted the find circumstances of the Linear

B tablets and purposely delayed their publication (Wood, 1985, p. 111).4
Schliemann and Evans were pioneers in the field of archaeology and,
as such, as Wood (1985, p . 111) generously points out, were inevitably
subject to mistakes. However, with hindsight, we see clearly that both
men consciously manipulated data to conform to preconceived ideas.
One wonders how Freud, having acknowledged the problems and
"sources of error" (Kuspit, 1989, p . 138) to which the nascent field of
archaeology was subject, could have chosen to employ it as a metaphor
for his own ideas concerning the reconstruction of the mind . Even more
difficult to understand, however, is the loyal defense of the metaphor by
modern scholars.
Freud "never completely gave up any idea he had once accepted [and]
. . . his attachment to the archaeological metaphor was especially intense"
(Kuspit, 1989, p. 136). In this way he was very Egyptian, inasmuch as
the Egyptians were the pack rats of the ancient world, mythologically
speaking: they possessed a genius for "adapting and harmonizing differ­
ent traditions and systems without actually discarding anything" Games,
1979, p. 148) and "had the capacity to innovate without abandoning what
was old" (Morenz, 1973, p. 70) . However, I resent quaint generalizations
and antiquated assumptions made about my field of inquiry. I believe
that to encourage, as Ellen Handler Spitz (1989, pp. 153-154, 167) has
proposed, a continuation of the association of psychoanalysis and
archaeology would be naivete if such an association continued to be based
on a romanticized or oversimplified image of what archaeology is about.
The humanities and sciences should cooperate without preconceptions or
projections so that we, once and for all, can converse without need of
metaphor; you show me, from your own authority, the insights you have
gleaned, and I , from my own, will show you mine. Perhaps we will be
disappointed to discover our expectations unrealistic, but perhaps they
will exceed our wildest imagination.

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