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In archaeology, and its stunning discoveries, Sigmund Freud was beginning to see a parallel with his own methods of exploring the human mind, writes B. N. Goswamy
COME to think of it, it would be perfectly natural for Sigmund Freud, who has left so large and clear an imprint on our age, to take interest in archaeological finds. For they lead one slowly to worlds now apparently lost to us, reminding one of Freud’s own method as a psychoanalyst of digging deep into the minds of his patients for discovering layers, recovering the past. It has been more than 60 years since Freud, virtual Father of the Science of Psychoanalysis, died. In all these years his reputation has swung dramatically between extremes: from being celebrated as one of the greatest minds ever, to being regarded as an impostor who set a whole world hurtling along misguided paths. An enormous amount of literature has grown around him, it being in fashion to analyse the mind of this analyst. A part of this inquiry into his psyche is an examination of the objects of art—his collection of ‘old and grubby gods’ as he used to call it himself—which he kept acquiring virtually throughout his active career. "Freud’s antiquities" have been a favoured theme of exhibitions and symposia, subject of close analysis and evaluation, in Europe. One knows that nearly all the artefacts, which he was able to take out of Vienna, his home, while fleeing from the Nazis in 1938, have their permanent abode in London, where he died. They can be seen in situ more or less as he left them, for his home has been turned into the Freud Museum. As someone who went to that museum wrote: "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 collection that Freud amassed included nearly two thousand antiquities, but it grew slowly. Initially, he was interested more in looking at art, and Janine Burke, who has written sensitively on this passion of his, recreates an image of him bustling through the labyrinth of medieval streets at Vienna’s heart on his way to the great Kunsthistorische Museum, day after day, possibly passing on the way Adolf Hitler, a fellow-Austrian. There at the Museum he would view the treasure troves of Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, wondering about the kind of world they came from, but also about the men who made such objects. He began collecting, for there were many antiquities dealers in the city. As Burke writes: "If he saw an item he desired, some brisk bargaining took place; then Freud hurried home with a new prize—perhaps mummy bandages from an Egyptian tomb or an elegant Greek vase depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx or a Roman intaglio ring." And then he would sit gazing at his new ‘toy’, before carefully arranging it alongside the others in his collection. "I must always have an object to love," he told Carl Jung once. It was during the writing of his great classic, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899 that Freud’s enthusiasm for myths and objects of antiquity truly began to flower. His home started filling with statues, reliefs, vases, busts, fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones, prints, even Asian artefacts. There is an old photograph of Freud sitting in his study, and not far from him, on the table, one sees a statuette of the Buddha seated. Gradually, collecting started turning into an obsession—a word that Freud might not have liked as applied to himself—and the picture that is painted of him as a collector is not particularly pretty. He did not care how he acquired his antiquities, nor was he averse to trading on the ‘schwarz-markt’ as it was called: illegal trade. All collectors turn obsessive at some point of time, but Freud was something of a predator. Self-deprecatingly he described himself once: "I am actually not a man of science" he wrote, "not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." Curious words these, coming from an icon of the modern scientific temper. But perhaps he was hiding his new and consuming interest in archaeology behind them. For in that science, and its stunning discoveries, he was beginning to see a parallel with his own methods of exploring the human mind. This was a point of time when Freud was at the busy crossroads of his private life, his analytical practice, his theoretical writings, his public ambitions for the new "science" of psychoanalysis. And, somehow, at the heart of it came to stand his consuming passion for archaeology. The reason is not far to seek: collecting antiquities and understanding archaeology had begun to influence the development of psychoanalysis. Uncovering one’s unconscious was much like the painstaking and careful work of archaeologists. "The psychoanalyst," Freud wrote himself, "like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures." There are all kinds of things one picks up here. Freud was an admirer and friend of the great Austrian writer of that time, Stefan Zweig. The two wrote to each other frequently: a long correspondence between them has survived. In one of his letters, Freud marvels at Zweig’s wonderful mastery of detail. To someone else he said that it was like 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. It is a wonderful image, but, with it, one is back in Freud’s favourite field of archaeology. It is a pity that Freud did not write much on the art that he collected, or else it would have been wonderful to ‘hear’ him on individual works. What is it that an Egyptian relief, some three thousand years old, say to him? How did he see the hermaphrodite figures of ancient Rome? Did he talk to the Greek sirens on his table? One would never know. Only the little statuettes in his study, now in the London Museum, might have a clue.
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