Freud’s Collection Compulsion
The archaeological site of the mind
anna parker
Reclined on his couch, Freud’s patients conjured up the figures that populated their childhoods, reliving past experiences of love, loss, sexuality, and death that shaped their lives in the present. Surrounding the psychoanalyst and his patient were thousands of figures, books, and artworks. Freud was an avid collector. He liked things from the ancient world, primarily Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Greece. In Tribute to Freud, H.D.—a poet and former patient—recalled her first visit to Freud’s study: “No one had told me that his room was lined with treasures. I was to greet the Old Man of the Sea, but no one had told me of the treasures he had salvaged from the sea-depth…He is at home here. He is part and parcel of these treasures.” When the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud fled his home. He moved from Vienna to London and had his vast collection—nearly 2,500 objects in total—transported over the channel.
Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire exhibits these treasures at Freud’s London home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, now preserved as the Freud Museum. Its intention is to show Freud as a “compulsive collector of antiquities” as well as a theorist, and—intriguingly—it promises to show how his collection influenced his ideas. For an exhibition about objects, it is remarkably text based. It refers to the classical works that Freud read, such as Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, and the books he produced as he developed psychoanalytic theory, from The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) to his final work, Moses and Monotheism (1939). Objects plucked from the flood that filled his home have been chosen for their iconographic connection to the ancient myths and legends that Freud discussed in his writings.
If the exhibition aims to show the connection between Freud’s antiquity obsession and his theory, it is decidedly less interested in what produced his passions in the first place. There is a baffling lack of context on the twentieth-century history of Freud’s possessions, an omission that obscures what makes his sprawling array of antiquities significant: the fact that they were brought together in one place by one person at a specific point in time. The problems with Freud’s Antiquity serve as a lesson in the dangers of thinking too symbolically about the stuff of life. Before they are icons or symbols, objects are physical things. They circulate, connect, and form the cogs of social, domestic, and psychological life, acquiring new layers of history and meaning as they turn.
It is easy to be seduced by the connections between psychoanalysis and archaeology. Both were new disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century, and Freud—who was keen to legitimize his emerging “science”—found fruitful ground for metaphor by comparing the two. In Constructions in Analysis (1937), he wrote that the psychoanalyst’s work
resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice … just as the archaeologist builds up the walls of the 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 debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behavior of the subject of the analysis.
Freud did, however, draw a distinction between the fields. He said that the psychoanalyst is different from the archaeologist because “what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive.” In psychoanalysis, the past is animate. Personal history exerts influence on the individual’s present, revealing itself, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, in the patient’s thought and behavior—like a set of foundations that invisibly enforce the shape of a building. Despite its foundations, the mind is a site in motion: the locations of walls, columns, and murals shift like tectonic plates. Fragments of memory are retranscribed by the very act of remembering, their meaning, significance, and association altering every time the patient recalls them.
The discipline of archaeology has moved on considerably since Freud wrote Constructions in Analysis. Modern archaeologists argue that they—like psychoanalysts—deal with aspects of the past that are still alive. When an object is unearthed from the soil that preserved it, it reenters the surface world. It is handled again, it is passed between people, and it acquires new meanings—in short, it lives. The issue with Freud’s Antiquity is that the curators strip the objects of precisely what makes them interesting: the layers of sticky sediment that the artefacts gained when they were lifted back out of the ground.
In psychoanalysis, the past is animate. Personal history exerts influence on the individual’s present, revealing itself, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, in the patient’s thought and behavior—like a set of foundations that invisibly enforce the shape of a building.
While the objects in Freud’s collections were from the ancient world, they had a twentieth-century history too. Freud’s Antiquity makes little mention of the European interwar craze for archaeology that furnished Freud with his possessions (and, indeed, with the archaeological analogy quoted above). His was an age of unprecedented archaeological discovery. The Bronze-Age Cretan city of Knossos was subject to a major excavation from 1900 and the site steadily threw up objects for the next thirty years; Tutankhamun’s tomb was uncovered by Howard Carter in 1922, and in the same year, digging began on the site of Ur, a Mesopotamian city-state. Like many others at the time, Freud found himself irresistibly compelled by the widely publicized findings, which even textured his dreams. He described a dream of his mother being carried through the air by what looked like “gods with falcons” heads from an “ancient Egyptian funerary relief.” Freud was fond of metaphorizing his discovery of psychoanalysis as “reading the riddle of the Sphinx” and even “discovering the source of the Nile.”
Freud’s plan of “getting rich” seemed to come out of him in a sudden burst, an impulsive notion that perhaps acquisition might cushion him against grief.
The European interwar obsession with archaeology was not a detached, scientific interest in the past. Fantasy played an essential part in the imagining of “antiquity,” just as it did—and does—with any other area of history. In 2020, heritage scholar Lizzie Glithero-West argued that early twentieth-century archaeological findings “tapped into deeper preoccupations.” Following the Great War, Europe was “a society in mourning, plagued with uncertainty” and “left in a state of irresolution” as the corpses of soldiers lay—many never to be recovered—along front lines in France and Belgium. Reeling from the trauma of war, Europeans projected a fascination with death, destruction, and loss onto a—safely distanced—ancient setting. Relatedly, antiquity would come to play a part in the emergence of interwar fascism with its veneration of the ancient Roman world and Mussolini’s elevation of death as a sacred state of being. The psychic legacies of mass mourning, modern industrial warfare, and the unprecedented displacement of people are as much a part of Freud’s collection as the antique world in which the objects were produced. It is a shame the exhibition reflects little on this, gesturing more at the fact that northern Europeans could project a sexually liberated past onto areas of southern Europe like Naples, rather than dealing directly with this greater pretext for Freud’s collection.
Freud’s love of antiquity—and the rerouting of feelings around death that the broader cultural phenomena represented—had a personal dimension; it tracked with tragedies in his own history, albeit on a smaller scale, and before the start of war. Freud made the first purchase for his collection in 1896, two months after his father died. He bought two plaster casts of Florentine statues, and wrote to a friend, “I have now adorned my room with plaster casts of the Florentine statues … It was a source of extraordinary refreshment for me; I mean to get rich, in order to repeat these trips.” Freud’s plan of “getting rich” seemed to come out of him in a sudden burst, an impulsive notion that perhaps acquisition might cushion him against grief. Freud’s desire for wealth reveals the profit motive in psychoanalysis, and it suggests how it might have affected his clinical practice. It is unrealistic to pretend that psychoanalysts are not economic agents, just as everyone else is. Did Freud think of possible purchases for his collection—potential new sources of “refreshment”—as he took a patient’s hourly fee?
Far-wider relations of capital were at work in Freud’s collection. Freud’s Antiquity misses an opportunity to engage directly with how twentieth-century imperialism shaped the idea of “antiquity.” The supply chain that fed Europeans’ appetite for antiquities relied on colonial networks established in occupied territories, where archaeologists unearthed what they interpreted to be leftovers from societies more “primitive” than their own. Like his contemporaries, Freud made much of the binary of “primitive” and “civilized.” In Totem and Taboo (1913), he wrote that “there are men still living who … stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do.” Freud argued that the childlike and untamed “savage” mind—encountered either through archaeological discoveries from the distant past or through the living survivals of “antiquity” in the colonies—could reveal the origins of mental life. His assumption explains why the linguistic detritus of colonialism appears everywhere in psychoanalysis: take, for example, the term “fetish,” used to describe the displacement of unconscious desires or fantasies onto material objects or body parts.
The “primitive” statuettes, amulets, and vessels discovered on digs in Egypt, India, and Iraq were immediately taken into European ownership. Locals were treated much like clumsy children that are not yet considered responsible enough to play with their parents’ precious family heirlooms. The ever-growing demand of the Western market led to the wholesale ransacking of archaeological sites, a tradition in place from the nineteenth century. At one point, the European market was so saturated with Egyptian mummies that they were sold wholesale for paper, fertilizer, and paint pigment (the shade was a rich hue called “mummy brown”). The use of dead bodies as fodder for commerce is almost too apt a metaphor for modern colonialism. Freud’s collection did not emerge untouched from the soil. His antiques are covered in dirt, even though—as is so often the case—the museum wipes it away.
Freud’s interest in the mental lives of “primitive” cultures and his collection of antiquities show how his work and love of art informed one another. Freud’s Antiquity seeks to connect the objects in Freud’s collection to his theories. When displaying the collection, the curators choose to focus on Freud’s ideas—such as the Oedipus complex—and compare them to visual symbols of the same stories on jugs, vessels, and urns. This is certainly one way in which objects can act as the apparatus of thought. Yet, reducing the process of thinking to its end result of having an idea or coming up with a theory cuts out a large swathe of cognition. It prioritizes the conscious and leaves little space for the unconscious on the one hand, or the material and political on the other. It is important to remember that Freud’s collection occupied his home; it surrounded him as he went about his daily work. Freud’s things acquired traces of his thought process through their involvement in his everyday routine and domestic habits.
Freud’s collection did not emerge untouched from the soil. His antiques are covered in dirt, even though—as is so often the case—the museum wipes it away.
The scant evidence of how Freud inhabited his collection hints at how his possessions physically participated in his work. H.D. recounted that Freud told her that his, “little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether.” Touching his artefacts seemed to be part of the process of stabilization: H.D. recounted that, during analysis, Freud handed over various items from his collection for her to inspect. While Freud’s collection is now preserved in a static layout, Freud regularly moved his things around. He stroked his favorites, shuffled others in and out of his desk drawers, and he used them as paper weights to pin down his drafts. This careful arrangement and rearrangement speaks to a cycling-through of ideas, a process that, for Freud, seemed to take place through the movement of matter. Such gestures will always be elusive and ephemeral, but they are as much part of the process of theorizing as the finished product.
Freud’s collection of ancient artefacts certainly is illustrative of his interest in antiquity, archaeology, and myth and legend. Yet, Freud’s treasures speak more to what these things meant in his own twentieth-century world than they do about the antique past. Just like fragments of individual memory that change with each act of remembering, artworks transform as they move through time, and they acquire new significance every moment. Although they might emerge from the ground visibly dirty, antiquities do not have a monopoly on sediment. Silt—in the form of politics, capital, personal history, and everyday routine—forms invisible layers over everything in the home. Look around.