Freud and Archaeology PDF

This article was downloaded by: [University of Western Australia]
On: 21 March 2014, At: 08:45

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Anthropological Forum: A Journal

of Social Anthropology and
Comparative Sociology
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/canf20
Freud and archaeology

a
Sandra Bowdler
a
Department of Anthropology , The University of Western
Australia , Nedlands, WA, Australia
Published online: 18 May 2010.
To cite this article: Sandra Bowdler (1996) Freud and archaeology, Anthropological
Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, 7:3, 419-438, DOI:
10.1080/00664677.1996.9967466
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.1996.9967466
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information
(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor
& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties
whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the
Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and
views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The
accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable
for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in
connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/
page/terms-and-conditions
SANDRA BOWDLER
Freud and archaeology
Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx formed the intellectual triumvi-
Downloaded by [University of Western Australia] at 08:45 21 March 2014
rate who determined how Europeans (sensu lato) think about the human species in
the twentieth century. The relationship between evolutionary theory and the
development of archaeology as a modern discipline is well-known. The use of
Marxist models in archaeological interpretation was pioneered by Gordon Childe
(Trigger 1989) and is now widespread. The relevance of Freud to archaeology is
not so immediately apparent. Archaeology was, however, very important to
Freud, in several different ways. All his life he collected antiquities; he followed
reports of archaeological discoveries and read widely on the topic; he used archae-
ological metaphors in his writings; and, according to some of his commentators,
considered himself to be an archaeologist of the mind.
In this paper, I wish to bring to a wider readership the nature of Freud's archae-
ological interests, and the ways in which they are important in his work. I will also
describe the rather surprising views of some modern Freudian commentators on
his archaeological interests (surprising to archaeologists, that is). I will consider his
use of the archaeological metaphor, and suggest that it reflects, interestingly,
changes in Freud's views of the development of the human psyche. I discuss some
of the underpinnings of Freud's thought derived specifically from nineteenth
century evolutionary biology. Finally, I will look at some of his purportedly
cultural historical writings, largely to try to determine the extent to which Freud
really understood the nature of archaeological research and its discoveries. This
involves an attempt to understand Freud's concept of the past, and what kind of
time scale he envisaged for human evolution and the development of Western
civilisation.
Freud's contribution to anthropology has been widely canvassed, particularly
with respect to Totem and taboo (Totem und tabu), published in 1913. It is certainly
not my intention to cover ground already widely covered, but clearly some
overlap will be inevitable. Generally speaking, psychoanalysis has, since Mali-
nowski's publication of Sex and repression in savage society in 1927, found a warmer
welcome amongst anthropologists in the US than in Britain, at least overtly (see
Birth 1994). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that much of the anthropological
discussion of Freud's work has been by Americans (e.g. Kluckhohn 1944, 1957;
Mead 1930,1963; Herskovits 1934), that is, when it has been discussed by anthro-
pologists and not by psychoanalysts and their congeners (but see also Hiatt 1987).
Anthropological Forum Volume 7, Number 3,1996

420 ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORUM
American anthropologists are more likely to consider archaeological aspects than

their British counterparts, but few appear to have done so.
Freud's interest in archaeology...
Freud's life spans the development of modern archaeology. When he was

born in 1856, Troy was a myth, and looting ancient treasures was a profit-
able business; at the end of his life, in 1939, archaeology was a science, and
national archaeological museums had been established in many ancient
cities, including Cairo and Athens. Earlier in the nineteenth century, geolo-
gists had begun to employ stratigraphy as a dating method, and Darwin's

publication of Origin of species, in 1859, permitted the assumption that man
has a long history (Gamwell 1989:22).
It is not widely known, among archaeologists at least, that Freud had from his
childhood a deep interest in antiquity. He expressed his gratitude to the Gymna-
sium for providing him with his 'first glimpses of an extinct civilisation' (Wallace
1983:5). When he travelled to Paris, he visited the Louvre to view the antiquities;
when in Berlin, he admired the Pergamene statues; in London he haunted the
British Museum; he travelled to Rome in 1902 and befriended an eminent classical
archaeologist there. All his adult life he collected antiquities, and, on his removal
to London, only felt at home once they were deployed about him (Freud et al.
1978:336n). His famous patient, the Wolf Man, observed that Freud's consulting
rooms in Vienna reminded him not of 'a doctor's office but rather of an archaeolo-
gist's study. Here were all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which
even the layman recognised as archaeological finds' (Gay 1988:170-1). Freud
followed accounts of excavations of the day in the press, acquiring Schliemann's
Troja (1976) in 1899, and referring to Evans's 1901 work at Knossos in Totem and
taboo (1913).
...and explanations of it
Some psychoanalytical theorists see Freud's culture-historical orientation contrib-
uting as much to his basic concepts as his clinical work did (Wallace 1983:8). There
is, naturally, a considerable interest in psychoanalytical circles in interpreting this
in Freudian terms. Freud's 'official' biographer, Jones (1957:316-7), sees Freud's
love for archaeology as connected with a longing for halcyon childhood days.
Bernfeld (1951) sees it as, inter alia, an attempt to deal with guilt over death wishes.
The recent celebrated (but not unanimously) biography by Peter Gay offers the
following observations:
If Freud's helpless love for cigars attests to the survival of primitive oral
needs, his collecting of antiquities reveals residues in adult life of no less
primitive anal enjoyments...So pointed a passion invites interpretation,
FREUD AND ARCHAEOLOGY 421
and Freud was not reluctant to provide it...[the antiquities] recalled friends
who had taken the trouble to remember how fond he was of these artifacts,
and they reminded him of the south...Like so many northerners...he loved
Mediterranean civilisation...Like Rome, his collection stood for obscure
claims on life...
Even more obscurely, his antiques seemed reminders of a lost world to

which he and his people, the Jews, could trace their remote roots...As he
studied his prized possessions, he found, as he told Ferenczi many years
later, 'strange secret yearnings' rising up in him, 'perhaps from my ances-
tral heritage—for the East and the Mediterranean and for a life of quite
another kind: wishes from late childhood never to be fulfilled and not
adapted to reality'. It is no coincidence that the man in whose life history
Freud took the greatest please, and whom he probably envied more than
any other, should have been Heinrich Schliemann...Freud thought the
career of Schliemann so extraordinary because in discovering 'Priam's trea-
sure' he had found true happiness...(Gay 1988:170-2).
In his discussion of Freud's use of archaeological metaphors (see below), Kuspit

(1989) makes some rather surprising observations, which rest initially on the idea
that archaeology in Freud's day had more popular appeal, and indeed respect-
ability, than did the infant discipline of psychoanalysis. By associating it with
archaeology, Freud was making:
A theatrical pitch to the public at large—the unintellectual crowd. The

analogy associated an unpopular, suspect enterprise with a popular,
respectable one, for Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy—his demon-
stration of the reality of its heroes, the facts that informed the legend—gave
archaeology a special celebrity, an honoured social place: it was an adven-
ture that produced concrete results, a means of showing the truthfulness of
literary fantasy...
Freud's appeal to archaeology can be regarded as an effort to ingratiate

psychoanalysis with society...and even to have some of the heroic quality
associated with archaeology rub off on psychoanalysis (Kuspit 1989:133).
Kuspit, of course, recognises Freud's more serious purposes in the use of the
archaeological metaphor (see below), but he appears quite taken with this populist
aspect:
Archaeology symbolises psychoanalysis at its most debunking and revolu-

tionary ...
There is something smugly triumphant in Freud's [1930] assertion of psy-

choanalysis's advantage over archaeology, as though at last he had reached
a long sought-for goal—his science finally besting the science with which it
was most competitive (at least as much as with medicine) (Kuspit 1989:136-
9).
I am quite sure that archaeologists were, and are, quite unaware of any such
competition.
Archaeology as metaphor
If we need metaphors, then perhaps we ought to reconsider his own. Freud

was an archaeologist. He was...an Oedipus digging hard for self-knowl-
edge (Spain 1992:219-220).
No close student of Freud has been able to escape this convenient and pow-
erful archaeological metaphor (Gay 1989:16).
The archaeological metaphor, as it has been called, is pervasive in Freud's

vision of psychoanalysis...It...effectively informs, and perhaps dominates,
Freud's sense of psychoanalysis from the earliest days of its development
to the end of his life. To understand the archaeological metaphor is to
understand the thrust, if not the detail, of psychoanalytic thinking, its
general orientation, if not its particular procedures and concepts. It is not
simply a dramatic device to enliven and adorn the discourse of psychoanal-
ysis—a way of disseminating and even popularising its approach to the
psyche—but the major instrument of its self-understanding (Kuspit
1989:133).
In his first full-length analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria (Fraulein

Elisabeth von R.), Freud developed a procedure for probing her memories which
he described as follows. 'This procedure was one of cleaning away the pathogenic
psychical material layer by layer, and we like to compare it with the technique of
excavating a buried city' (Freud & Breuer 1893-5, PFL 3:206). Similarly, the
recovery of repressed memories was seen to occur in reversed chronological order,
as at a ruined site (Wallace 1983:7).
In 1905, we find Freud invoking a kind of psychoanalytical Burra Charter:
In face of the incompleteness of my analytic results, I had no choice but to

follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to
the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics
of antiquity. I have restored what is missing, taking the best models known
to me from other analyses; but, like a conscientious archaeologist, I have
not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my
constructions begin (Freud 1905, PFL [Pelican Freud Library] 8-A1).1
Freud wished to explain to one of his patients, an obsessional neurotic immor-

talised as the 'Rat Man', the significance of discovering lost memories:
I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences

between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything
conscious was subject to a process of wearing away, while what was uncon-
scious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by
pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I

said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preserva-
tion; the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been
dug up (Freud 1909, PFL 9:57; emphasis in original).
A quite elaborate metaphor comparing the preservation of memories in the

unconscious with the survival of the past structures of ancient Rome may be found
in Civilisation and its discontents (Freud 1930, PFL 12:256-8).
These examples demonstrate more than Freud's grasp of the principles of
cultural resource management, and more also than his intellectual engagement
with archaeology and its methods. They point towards Freud's belief, mostly
rather implicit but becoming considerably more explicit in his later writings, that
the human psyche did in fact preserve the human species' antiquity in more than
a simple metaphorical sense.
Kuspit, in his detailed discussion of Freud's archaeological metaphor, does not
cite what I take to be its earliest use, and it is mentioned only in passing by Gay
(1988:172). It is of considerable interest in the light of the recent debate about the
development of Freud's ideas about the Oedipus complex (which of course under-
pins psychoanalysis), and his rejection of the so-called 'seduction hypothesis'.
According to Masson (1984), when Freud began working with 'hysterical' patients,
he believed them when they told him they had been sexually abused by their
parents (usually the father) or other adults whom they knew, often family
servants. He published this belief in a paper delivered to the Society for Psychiatry
and Neurology in Vienna in 1896. In the following year, he retracted this view, in
favour of one which saw these accusations as fantasies, thus following the path to
psychoanalysis which he pursued for the rest of his life. Masson has summarised
this change of heart and head in the following striking words:
By shifting the emphasis from an actual world of sadness, misery, and

cruelty to an internal stage on which actors performed invented dramas for
an invisible audience of their own creation, Freud began a trend away from
the real world that, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility
of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world (Masson 1984:144).
It is hardly necessary to describe the controversy this view has stirred up, and
not only in psychoanalytical circles (see, for instance, Malcolm 1984). It is hardly
surprising that the 1896 paper is one not often discussed by Freudians, but it does
contain the following early use of the archaeological metaphor:
In hysteria, too, there exists a similar possibility of penetrating from the

symptoms to a knowledge of their causes. But in order to explain the rela-
tionship between the method which we have to employ for this purpose
and the older method of anamnestic [remembering] enquiry, I should like
to bring before you an analogy taken from an advance that has in fact been
made in another field of work.
Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest

is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of col-
umns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may
content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with question-
ing the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live in the
vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these
archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he
may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have
brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants
to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the
ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains,
uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discover-
ies are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a
palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a
temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual,
reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered
and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the
remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loa-
uuntur! (Freud 1984: 252-3).
But the stones are made to speak by a technique abandoned by the later archae-
ological psychoanalyst: the use of local informant testimony. He proceeds by
'questioning the inhabitants' and notes down what they tell him. Not only that, he
may 'set the inhabitants to work', and 'together with them', he may start upon exca-
vating the ruins. It is fascinating to note that, after the time when Masson claims
Freud changed his mind and chose not to believe in the literal truth of what his
patients told him, he no longer enlisted their active participation in his metaphor-
ical excavations.
'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'

As Gamwell indicates (above), the development of modern archaeology was
largely intertwined with the development of modern concepts of geology and

Darwinian evolutionary theory. Lyell's (1830-33) uniformitarianism and the work
of Darwin (1859, 1871) and his successors, particularly T. H. Huxley (1863),
provided a suitable chronological and interpretative framework for investigating
the history of humans before writing, that is, the human prehistoric past (see, for
instance, Renfrew & Bahn 1991:24).
Freud was extremely dependent on the concepts of Darwin, and of the German
evolutionist Haeckel (1866), in formulating some of his key ideas. There is no
doubt whatever that he was more than familiar with the work of Darwin and his
successors. At the University of Vienna, Freud studied under biologist Carl Claus,
a notable exponent of Darwinian theory, and had acquired most of Darwin's

works by 1883 (Ritvo 1972,1974). By the time of publication of The interpretation of
dreams (1900, PFL 4:58), Freud had become familiar with the work of the evolu-
tionary anthropologists Lubbock (1865,1870), Spencer (1855) and Tylor (1871).
The concept of recapitulation, argues Stephen Jay Gould (1981:114), 'ranks
among the most influential ideas of late nineteenth century science'. The phrase
'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' means that an individual of a given species in
its own growth and development passes through a series of stages representing
adult ancestral forms in the order in which they had evolved. To quote Gould
again, that is to say that an individual 'climbs its own family tree' (1981:114; see
also Gould 1977). This notion was developed by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel
out of Darwin's evolutionary theory and, as Gould notes, was a notion used by
Freud to characterise the development of the human psyche. Freud's most elabo-
rate use of the notion was in Totem and taboo and other later writings, but it seems
in fact to have been quite central to psychoanalytical theory from the start.
In lecture 13 of the Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, Freud (1916-17, PFL
1:234) suggests that the study of the dream-work leads into two kinds of
prehistory:
On the one hand, into the individual's prehistory, his childhood, and on the
other, insofar as each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated
form the entire development of the human race, into phylogenetic prehis-
tory too...It seems to me...that symbolic connections, which the individual
has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a phylo-
genetic heritage.
In his discussion of the two courses of development of the ego and the libido in
lecture 22, Freud returned to this idea:
For both of them are at bottom heritages, abbreviated recapitulations of the

development which all mankind has passed through from its primeval
days over long periods of time. In the case of the development of the libido,
this phylogenetic origin is, I venture to think, immediately obvious...In the
case of human beings...this phylogenetic point of view is partly veiled by

the fact that what is at bottom inherited is nevertheless freshly acquired in
the development of the individual, probably because the same conditions
which originally necessitated its acquisition persist and continue to operate
upon each individual (Freud 1916-17, PFL 1:400; emphasis in original).
We can identify also here the Lamarckianism often attributed to Freud, and in
fact common in a post-Darwinian but pre-Mendelian world.2 'Constitutional
dispositions are also undoubtedly after-effects of experiences by ancestors in the
past; they too were once acquired. Without such acquisition there would be no
heredity' (Freud 1916-17, lecture 23, PFL 1:407). Freud saw neurosis as arising from
adult traumatic experiences acting on the disposition due to fixation of the libido,
which itself had a twofold origin in the infantile experience plus the sexual consti-
tution due to prehistoric experience (PFL 1:408; emphasis mine).
In discussing 'primal phantasies', Freud comments that 'I have repeatedly been
led to suspect that the psychology of the neuroses has stored up in it more of the
antiquities of human development than any other source' (PFL 1:418); a comment
which seems to me to partake of both metaphor and what Freud perceived to be
an hereditary reality.
Other examples of Freud's belief in the hereditary nature of aspects of the
psyche could be multiplied. They reach their culmination in Totem and Taboo
(1913), which I will discuss in more detail below. I think I have shown, however,
that Freud was indeed influenced by Darwinian evolution, and particularly the
ideas of Haeckel, in formulating aspects of psychoanalytical theory. I do not,
however, think we need go as far as Badcock in his assertions of Freud's rightful
place as a modern evolutionary thinker (e.g. Badcock 1992).
Freud and the past

In reading Freud, I became interested in his concept of the past, and of human
development. I wanted to try and identify what sort of time scale Freud envisaged
for human evolution and for the development of Western civilisation. I wondered
whether Freud had any particular concept of the development of human culture in
its more material aspects, given especially his familiarity with Lubbock, Morgan
and Tylor. I began to look for clues as to his concept of 'civilisation', to see whether
it had much in common with how an archaeologist (then or now) would define it.
Totem and Taboo

In 1913, Freud addressed himself for the first time exclusively to questions of a
culture-historical nature. Totem and Taboo (1913) is subtitled 'Some points of agree-
ment between the mental lives of savages and neurotics'. It comprises four essays,
'The horror of incest', 'Taboo and emotional ambivalence', 'Animism, magic and
omnipotence of thoughts' and 'The return of totemism in childhood'. It is so well-
known, so easily accessible and comprises such a dense argument, that I will not
attempt to summarise it here.

The culmination of this work is the famous, or even notorious, 'primal crime'
or 'one fine day' theory. Once upon a time, humans lived in polygynous hordes
presided over by a single male:
A violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and
drives away his sons as they grow up...One day the brothers who had been
driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an
end of the patriarchal horde...The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's
earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this
memorable and animal deed which was the beginning of so many things—
of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion (PFL 13:202-3).
The brothers were however ambivalent towards their father; because they feared
and hated him, they killed him; but because also they loved and admired him, a
sense of guilt subsequently appeared:
They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substi-
tute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by now resigning their
claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of
their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for
that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the
Oedipus complex (i.e. to kill one's father and cohabit with one's mother;
PFL 13:204-5).
In defence of the 'one fine day...' aspect, Freud argued that he had abbreviated
the time factor and compressed the entire subject-matter; 'It would be foolish to
aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist upon certainty'
(PFL 13:204n). Furthermore, Freud even suggests that the primal crime need never
have happened in actual fact, but that the consequences would have been the same
had the brothers simply wished to kill and devour the father (PFL 13:222). He
concludes however that 'in the beginning was the Deed' (quoting Goethe's Faust,
PFL 13:224).
I do not wish to appear to be getting into a discussion as to whether the primal
crime did or did not ever occur. I think we can safely say it is an archaeologically
untestable construct. I would like, however, to look at what Freud's sources, or at
any rate bases, for such a theory were.
There is early evidence for a direct archaeological trigger to Freud's imagina-
tion. In a letter written in 1901, he wrote as follows:
Have you read that the English have excavated an old palace in Crete
(Knossos) which they declare is the authentic labyrinth of Minos? Zeus
seems originally to have been a bull. It seems, too, that our own old God,
before the sublimation instigated by the Persians took place, was also wor-
shipped as a bull. That provides food for all sorts of thoughts which it is not
yet time to set down on paper (quoted in PFL 13:46).
Freud's main sources, however, were the evidence of his patients' obsessions
and fantasies and the 'vestiges' detectable in children on the one hand, and 'prim-
itive' societies on the other (PFL 13:50,53). The very structure of his enquiry is thus
built around the concept that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny both in the normal
development of the child and in the psychological development of the neurotic
psyche. All these things reinforced each other. We can, however, single out the
evidence of 'primitive' societies, and how and why Freud thought such evidence
of use:
Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us

through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left
behind, through the information about his art, his religion and his attitude
towards life which has come to us either directly or by way of tradition
handed down in legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of
his mode of thought which survive in our own manners and customs (PFL
13:53).
Here we see an appeal to archaeological evidence ('inanimate monuments and

implements') virtually indistinguishable from oral tradition ('legends, myths and
fairy tales'), let alone modern 'survivals' in our own society. Little of the first of
these is in fact actually used; possibly the only such example is peripheral, a foot-
noted reference to French cave art (PFL 13:149).
Most of Freud's evidence came from ethnographic sources:
There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive
man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct
heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as
savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest
for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early
stage of our own development (PFL 13:53).
It is hardly fair to criticise Freud for the problematical assumption built into this
approach, since it has been espoused almost continually from the time of Darwin
to the present day, as Schrire has pointed out-
Detailed records of living hunter-gatherer behaviour...[are] regarded as a
source of potent insights into an otherwise unattainable reconstruction of
the course of human evolution (Schrire 1980:10).
Freud, however, was himself aware of the paradox involved:
It must not be forgotten that even the most primitive and conservative
races are in some sense ancient races and have a long past history behind
them during which their original conditions of life have been subject to
much development and distortion (PFL 13:56n).
It should not be forgotten that primitive races are not young races but are in
fact as old as civilised races...The determination of the original state of
things thus invariably remains a matter of construction (PFL 13:161n).
Wallace (1983:109n) suggests this was a more or less pro forma disclaimer
inserted by Freud, like Lang and others, to be immediately forgotten. It seems to
me, however, that Freud believed that there was a very fundamental difference
between 'primitive' people and 'civilised' people, a mental difference, funda-
mental to all his work. In the same place where he inserts the last quoted
disclaimer, he mentions 'primitive modes of thinking' (PFL 13:162n). This is unde-
niably a form of unilinear evolution but its determinants are quite different from
those of Frazer et al.3
Having said the above, Freud proceeded to ransack the ethnography of Austra-
lian Aborigines, North American Indians, Polynesians, Indonesians and Africans
for relative data, although what he mostly ransacked was Frazer's commodious
collection of these. Freud has been much criticised for simply looking for evidence
to support what he already believed. (This is of course what we might now see as
a hypothetico-deductive approach.) Freud's formulation of the primal horde was,
however, not ethnographically derived, since he saw all modern peoples as being
post-primal crime, hence the universal possession of at least traces of totemism,
horror of incest, and so on.
The concept of the patriarchal primal horde in fact derives directly from
Darwin, who got it from observations of primate behaviour (PFL 13:185-6). Rather
like the use of ethnography alluded to above, the use of ethology to elucidate early
hominid behaviour on the grounds that early hominids were 'closer to apes' has
hardly been limited to Freud or the early 20th century.
I wish to pursue two other lines of thought: To see whether Freud had in mind
any kind of time scale for dating the primal crime, whether he envisaged it as
relating to a stage of human evolution in a physical sense, and to discover what
other notions of cultural evolution he espoused, especially as they might relate to
his scheme of psychological evolution. These ideas are all somewhat intertwined,
and must of course be seen in the context of the archaeological evidence of the day.
The early years of the 20th century were the period of consolidation of
Darwinian theory applied to human evolution, and of the development of what we
would see as modern archaeological techniques. It was, however, many years
before modern dating techniques allowed the chronological certainties we now
take for granted.

The first Neanderthal skeleton had been discovered in the 1850s, but was not
then recognised as being of evolutionary significance. After the publication of On
the origin of species (1859), and of course The descent of man (1871), not to mention
Huxley's Evidence as to man's place in nature (1863), the hunt was on for the 'missing
link', and a primitive 'Neanderthal man' became an acceptable human precursor.
The discovery of 'Cro-Magnon man' in the late 19th century, a physically modern
'cave man', confirmed Neanderthal's phylogenetically prior position. Cro-
Magnon was, by 1900, identified as the first Homo sapiens, who lived in the Ice Age
but created works of art on cave walls. In 1893, a predecessor of Neanderthal was
identified. Dubois discovered in Java even more primitive fossils named 'Pithecan-
thropus': ape man. Nowhere, however, have I found any direct reference in
Freud's writings to any of these fossil finds or their supposed evolutionary status.
With respect to more purely archaeological discoveries and concepts relating to
preliterate human societies, by 1913 the terms Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze
Age were in common usage. Freud could certainly have come across them in
Lubbock's Prehistoric times (1865), although he refers only to that author's The
origin of civilisation (1870). The distinction between Lower Palaeolithic (hand axes
in the Somme terraces, etc.) and Upper Palaeolithic (Cro-Magnon living in caves
during the Ice Age, with rock art and extinct animals) had been made and elabo-
rated on by Lartet & Christy(1865-75), De Mortillet (1897) and others; Breuil's first
work on cave art appeared in 1908. The Neolithic was still at this time seen as char-
acterised by polished stone artefacts; Childe (1925) was yet to turn the spotlight
onto the origins of agriculture and animal domestication as a significant cultural
'revolution'. Again, however, I have found no reference by Freud to any of the pre-
Bronze Age archaeological works of the day, with the exception of Reinach's
Cultes, mythes et religions (1905-12), from which Freud quoted (in a footnote) a
passage on the mystic intent of 'the primitive artists who left behind the carvings
and paintings of animals in the French caves' (PFL 13:149n). Why did Freud not
refer to Lartet & Christy, De Mortillet, the findings of DuBois (1894), and so on,
particularly given his familiarity with Lubbock on the one hand, Schliemann and
Evans on the other? Perhaps, not unlike some modern scholars and some of our
students, he regarded stone age archaeology as boring and dull, but this seems
unlikely. Perhaps, rather, he could get sufficient information from ethnography for
his purposes, filtered through Frazer (1907-15), Tylor (1871) and Morgan (1877).
The study of stone tools and animal bones at that time was in its infancy, and
provided only mundane detail, with little grist to the mill of the imagination.
The lack of firm dating controls was, of course, a huge problem in interpreting
the firmly preliterate archaeological record. It was much simpler then to construct
a cultural evolutionary framework from an assessment of contemporary 'primi-
tive' societies. Anyone could see that Australian Aborigines were 'most primitive',
and had no bow and arrow. Yet even they had fire. So Morgan, for instance, could
construct an evolutionary ladder based on technological accomplishments with no
concern whatsoever for archaeological evidence. Morgan's construct (from Ancient

society 1877, cited in Totem and taboo PFL 13:59,181) looks like this:
Lower savagery: From the emergence of man to the discovery of fire.

Middle savagery: From fire to the bow and arrow.
Upper savagery: From the bow and arrow to pottery.
Lower barbarism: From pottery to the domestication of animals.
Middle barbarism: From the domestication of animals to the smelting of iron.
Upper barbarism: From the smelting of iron to the invention of a phonetic
alphabet.
Civilisation: From the invention of the alphabet and writing.
What, however, qualified as 'man'? This is not a problem that Freud ever
bothers with; his story starts after 'man' has emerged. As to the rest, we can see that
Freud had absorbed some of Morgan's scheme.
Freud had certainly taken on board notions of social Darwinism, wherein, for
instance, the Polynesians were seen to have a 'higher' culture than Australian
Aborigines (PFL 13:76), but it is unclear to what extent he would see this as relating
to technology only. I get the impression that, with respect to contemporary societies,
Freud saw only two divisions, primitive and civilised. He is certainly reluctant to
go for the old chestnut of Aborigines being too primitive mentally to understand
about physical paternity: there is 'no reason why ignorance of the conditions
governing fertilization should be imputed to them any more than to the peoples of
antiquity at the time of the origin of the Christian myths' (PFL 13:178). To antici-
pate somewhat, it would seem that Freud saw all contemporary 'primitive'
peoples as remaining psychologically at the 'animistic level' and not to be further
ranked within that (PFL 13:157). Within civilisations, however, 'levels' can be
assessed (PFL 13:156).
I have tried to construct a Freudian scheme for cultural/psychological evolu-
tion from clues in Totem and taboo, to see what, if anything, they tell us about
Freud's view of the human past. Freud had a clear concept of the evolution of
human views of the universe, the evolution of Weltanschauung perhaps, which I
take to be a basic key. There was an early, essentially non-human, state that
preceded animism. Animism would appear to be what makes a human; all modern
'primitive' peoples are animistic, all believe in spirits, all believe in magic and the
'omnipotence of thoughts' (PFL 13:137, 146). I am not entirely sure, but I think
Freud assumed that the development of language preceded animism, but a
language of abstract thought succeeded it; that is how I interpret the following
passage:
The function of attention was originally directed not towards the internal
world but toward the stimuli that stream in from the external world,
and...that function's only information upon endopsychic processes was

received from feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. It was not until a lan-
guage of abstract thought had been developed, that is to say, not until the
sensory residues of verbal presentations had been linked to the internal
processes, that the latter themselves gradually became capable of being
perceived...The projection of their own evil impulses into demons in only
one portion of a system which constituted the Weltanschauung of primitive
peoples, and which we shall come to know as 'animism'...(PFL 13:120-1).
There is no doubt that Freud saw symbolism in language as being universal to

humans (e.g. PFL 13:343-4), a quite different thing to 'abstract thought'. I suspect,
but cannot demonstrate, that Freud probably equated abstract thought with
written language.
In the Freudian Weltanschauung scheme of evolution, animism precedes reli-
gion and religion precedes science (PFL 13:146). The creation of spirits (animism)
is man's first theoretical achievement (PFL 13:151), the first complete theory of the
universe (PFL 13:153). The origins (but not necessarily the beginnings) of civilisa-
tion lie in the primal crime: the patriarchal horde is replaced by the fraternal clan.
This involves a repression of instincts in favour of a group cohesion: a psycho-social
contract (PFL 13:208). Civilisation, for Freud, depends on that repression of
instincts (PFL 13:156). The primal crime is never forgotten, and determines the
nature of religion in succeeding times. After the fraternal clan came the mother
goddesses, themselves overturned in favour of father gods (Frazer and all that, of
course), and a new form of patriarchal family.
The institution of totemic animal sacrifice followed the primal crime. To
Freud's mind, it must therefore have preceded the domestication of animals, since
the latter mitigates against sacrifice. Oddly, and I have no clue as to why Freud
thought so, the sacrifice of animals was also older than the use of fire. Agriculture
came later still. During the period of the post-mother goddess patriarchal family,
the introduction of agriculture led to the son trying again to replace the father god:
'He ventured upon new demonstrations of his incestuous libido, which found
symbolic satisfaction in his cultivation of Mother Earth'. And, though she may
have reciprocated in myth, the son in the form of Attis, Adonis and the rest
suffered for it. And so on to Christianity (PFL 13:214-5).
For Freud, the ontogeny of the individual recapitulates the phylogeny of the
human experience. The auto-eroticism of the child reflects the pre-animism period.
Narcissism is equivalent to animism; turning to the parent(s) as an external object
of desire is equivalent to religion; and, of course, the mature individual has an atti-
tude like that of science, an objective and realistic view of the external world. We
are all, however, subject to 'the sense of guilt for an action [that] has persisted for
many thousands of years and [that] has remained operative in generations which
can have no knowledge of that action' (PFL 13:220). How, exactly? Freud's answer
at this stage was distinctly woolly. Not till Moses and monotheism (1939) does he
really spell this out, and other matters besides; so we shall return to that work
below.
Freud's aim initially was to draw attention to similarities between the mental
lives of 'savages' and neurotics; in the end, he attempted to determine some
reasons for neurosis by using evidence culled from ethnography to erect a prehis-
tory of the mind and a single prehistoric event of psychological significance. In the
end, he concluded that neurotics are inhibited, i.e. civilised, while 'primitive men'
are uninhibited (PFL 13:224); all, however, remain heirs to the consequences of the
Primal Crime. The most famous conclusion of Totem and taboo is, undoubtedly, that
'the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus
complex' (PFL 13:219).
A 1915 'Evolution of civilisation and its neurotic parallels'

In a letter to Ferenczi in 1915, Freud argued that neuroses formed a series, as
follows: Anxiety hysteria—conversion hysteria—obsessional neurosis—dementia
praecox—paranoia—melancholia—mania. He suggested that this series recapitu-
lated stages of society:
Anxiety hysteria: The privations of the Ice Age.

Conversion hysteria: The need to limit overpopulation.
Obsessional neurosis: The appearance of the primal horde.
Dementia praecox: Pressure from the primal father to relinquish all sexual
objects.
Paranoia: The struggle against homosexuality instituted by the primal
father.
Melancholia: Remorse over the murder of the primal father.
Mania: Identification with the primal father (Jones 1957:330).
While this is not terribly convincing, to the archaeologist at least, it is of interest

in being the only reference to the Ice Age by Freud that I have come across, and in
that it makes clear his view that the primal horde came after it. If Freud was at all
aufait with current thinking, he would have known that Cro-Magnon, physically
modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), appeared well before the end of the Ice
Age. If so, he is arguing that the primal horde appeared a long time after the evolu-
tion of modern humans. I must confess to not knowing what construction to put
upon the intervening stage, the need to limit overpopulation. One admittedly
fanciful speculation is that it is derived from Malthus via Darwin and that the end
of the Ice Age led to an amelioration of the environment, which led to overpopu-
lation, which led to a dying-off of individuals, which led to the primal family as an
adaptive response.
Moses and monotheism

One of Freud's last published works, Moses and monotheism, returns to the Primal
Crime, but with rather more use of recognisable archaeological evidence. This
consists of three essays written between 1934 and 1938. The first two, 'Moses an
Egyptian' and 'If Moses was an Egyptian ...' were published in 1937. The third,
'Moses, his people and monotheist religion', was published after Freud's move to
London in 1939, with the expectation that he would lose some of his new friends.
This late work spells out some of the less clear areas of Totem and taboo, as well as
applying its arguments to the Jewish and Christian religions in particular.
The first essay puts forward the argument that Moses was indeed an Egyptian,
that he had been a disciple of the monotheistical Pharaoh Akhenaten and that he
had led the incipient Jews from Egypt during the time of political upheaval
following Akhenaten Ill's death, passing on to them the new religion. Freud
derived much of his argument from what we would strictly call historical sources,
but he used archaeological arguments also. I do not want to delve too deeply into
Freud's actual arguments here, but again we find the Oedipus complex and the
primal crime as the major precipitants of events and institutions. The traditional
Egyptian religion, with its animal-headed gods, is only half-evolved from
totemism (PFL 13:256). Moses, in the end, was slain by his followers, an enactment
of the primal crime; and, of course, the concept of the god-father is a reflection of
the loved and hated patriarch and a projection of the Oedipus complex.
Freud's arguments that Moses was an Egyptian and a follower of Akhenaten
required him to re-calculate the traditional period during which Moses was
thought to live. On the one hand, he saw little reason to treat the Bible as a reposi-
tory of literal truth, especially with respect to chronology (PFL 13:281). On the
other, he does invoke material evidence. With respect to Akhenaten, Freud says
that 'what little we know of him is derived from the ruins of the new royal capital
which he built and dedicated to his god and from the inscriptions in the rock tombs
adjacent to it' (PFL 13:258). One of his most interesting archaeological arguments
relates to circumcision. Freud points out that this was a common practice amongst
the Egyptians and hardly likely to have been thought of as a distinguishing char-
acteristic for the Jews while they were in Egypt; it is thus central to his thesis that
Moses was, indeed, an Egyptian. His evidence that circumcision was indigenous to
Egypt comes not only from Herodotus, but also from 'findings in mummies and
indeed...pictures on the walls of tombs'; he even refers to it as being like a 'key-
fossil' (PFL 13:279). And then there are its symbolic associations with castration
and the primaeval past (PFL 13:336).
In Moses and monotheism, Freud also spells out in detail his ideas about the
evolution of mother goddesses and their overthrow by the old jealous father-gods.
He sees monotheism, however, as being not only traceable to the primal crime, but
as also being associated with the 'higher ethics' of civilisation, and the increasing
renunciation of instinct. There is an interesting digression on the relationship
between epic poetry and 'lost civilisations', where Freud suggests that the national
epics of Germans, Indians and Finns should lead archaeologists to Schliemann-like
discoveries (PFL 13:313); only in the case of India has this been the case, with the
recovery of the Indus civilisations at Mohenjo-daro. Another interesting aside,

particularly with regard to historical circumstances of the time, is Freud's observa-
tion that 'progress' in Italy and Russia was allying itself with 'barbarism'; in the
case of Germany, however, 'a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism can occur
as well without being attached to any progressive ideas' (PFL 13:296).
One of the most interesting aspects of Moses and monotheism is Freud putting his
cards on the table with respect to admitting he believed in biologically inherited
memory traces, and that this is where we preserve our 'archaic heritage': 'men
have always known...that they once possessed a primal father and killed him'
(PFL 13:346).
Freud also responded to his critics in this late work, and stood by his early opin-
ions. 'I am not an ethnologist but a psychoanalyst. I had a right to take out of
ethnological literature what I might need for the work of analysis' (PFL 13:380).
Modern Freudians, of course, want to take it back out of Freud and lose it alto-
gether, but, from Freud's point of view, that would be pulling out some of the
cornerstones of the psychoanalytic structure.
Freud as archaeologist?
In looking for historical determinants of human psychological development,
Freud used what was available to him in terms of both data and methodology. He
did not, it is true, make much of the available hard evidence of stone age archae-
ology or hominid evolution, but it probably would not have helped him much.
Given, also, Freud's concept of the distinctions between 'primitive' and 'civilised',
and his posited relationship of the former to the truly 'primal', his use of ethnog-
raphy to explicate prehistory seems to me to be rather better thought out than, for
instance, Graham Clark's (1954) use of Eskimoes to explicate the British Mesolithic.
We must conclude that, despite Freud's great interest in archaeology, it was
essentially a layman's interest. There is little evidence that this interest was
returned in any way, that Freud had any influence at all on the development of
archaeology, unless it lies in the widespread acceptance of a human unconscious
(but that is another paper altogether). If there was indeed a competition between
psychoanalysis and archaeology as Kuspit suggests, archaeologists have been
blissfully unaware of it. Conversely, however, it is remarkable how significant
Freud's own interest in archaeology has been, or has been seen to be by various
commentators, both on Freud the person and Freud the genitor of psychoanalysis.
NOTES
Acknowledgments: This paper was originally prepared for the symposium 'The place of
hunters and gatherers in anthropology and European social thought', convened by Les
Hiatt and Rhys Jones for the Fifth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Soci-
eties, held in Darwin, August-September, 1988. I am grateful to the organisers and
especially Les Hiatt for his comments; also John Gordon, Greg Acciaioli, James Chisolm and
an anonymous reviewer. Other useful conversations on Freud have been had with Anna
Gibbs, Pen Hetherington, Robert Kosky, Penny Boumelha and others now buried in my
unconscious. I thank them all.
1. Abbreviation used: PFL = Pelican Freud Library, 15 vols, ed. Angela Richards for
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
2. In the sense that although Mendel had by this time published his breeding experi-
ments, the concepts involved were not widely accepted until well into the 20th century.
3. 'Modern researches into the early history of man, conducted on different lines, have
converged with almost irresistible force on the conclusion that all civilised races have at
some period or other emerged from a state of savagery resembling more or less closely the
state in which many backward races have continued to the present' (J. G. Frazer cited in
Kardiner & Preble 1963: 80-81).
REFERENCES CITED
BADCOCK, C. R. 1992 Freud's findings in the context of recent evolutionary theory. In Psy-
choanalytic anthropology after Freud: Essays marking the fiftieth anniversary of Freud's
death. D. H. Spain, ed. Pp. 250-272. New York: Psyche Press.
BERNFELD, S. 1951 Freud and archaeology. American Imago 8:107-128.
BIRTH, K. K. 1994 British anthropology and psychoanalysis before World War II: The evo-
lution of asserted irrelevance. Canberra Anthropology 17(l):53-69.
BREUIL, H. 1908 La caverne d'Altamira. Paris: Payot.
CHILDE, V. G. 1925 The dawn of European civilization. London: Kegan Paul.
CLARK, J. G. D. 1954 Excavations at Star Can. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
DARWIN, C. 1859 On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of
favoured races in the struggle for life. London: Murray.
DARWIN, C. 1871 The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. 1 vols. London: Murray.
De MORTILLET, G. 1897 Formation de la nation française. Paris: Alean.
DUBOIS, E. 1894 Pithecanthropus erectus: Eine menschenaehnliche Uebergangsform aus Java.
Batavia: Landesdruckerei.
EVANS, A. J. 1921-1936 The palace of Minos. 4 vols. London: Macmillan.
FRAZER, J. G. 1907-15 The golden bough, a study in magic and religion. 3rd ed. 12 vols.
London: Macmillan.
FREUD, E., L. FREUD & I. GRUBRICH-SIMITIS, eds. 1978 Sigmund Freud: His life in pictures
and words. London: André Deutsch.
FREUD, S. 1984 [1896] The aetiology of hysteria. Appendix B. In Freud: The assault on truth.
J. M. Masson, Pp. 251-282. London: Faber and Faber.
FREUD, S. 1900 The interpretation of dreams. Pelican Freud Library vol. 4.
FREUD, S. 1905 Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria ('Dora'). Pelican Freud Library
vol. 8.
FREUD, S. 1909 Notes upon a case of obsessbnal neurosis. Pelican Freud Library vol. 9.
FREUD, S. 1913 Totem and taboo. Pelican Freud Library vol. 13.
FREUD, S. 1916-7 Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Pelican Freud Library vol. 1.
FREUD, S. 1930 Civilisation and its discontents. Pelican Freud Library vol. 12.
FREUD, S. 1939 Moses and monotheism. Pelican Freud Library vol. 13.
FREUD, S. & J. BREUER 1893-5 Studies on hysteria. Pelican Freud Library vol. 3.
GAMWELL, L. 1989 The origins of Freud's antiquities collection. In Sigmund Freud and art:
His personal collection of antiquities. L. Gamwell and R. Wells, eds. Pp. 21-32. New
York: State University of New York and London: Freud Museum.
GAY, P. 1988 Freud: A life for our time. New York: Doubleday.
GAY, P. 1989 Introduction. In Sigmund Freud and art: His personal collection of antiquities. L.
Gamwell & R. Wells, eds. Pp. 15-19. New York: State University of New York and
London: Freud Museum.
GOULD, S. J. 1977 Ontogeny and phylogeny. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
GOULD, S. J. 1981 The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
HAECKEL, E. 1866 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine grundzüge der organis-
chen Formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte
Descendenz-theorie. Berlin: Reimer.
HERSKOVITS, M. 1934 Freudian mechanisms in Negro psychology. In Essays presented to C.
G. Seligman. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed. Pp. 75-84. Westport, Connecticut: Negro Uni-
versities Press.
HIATT, L. R. 1987 Freud and anthropology. In Creating culture: Profiles in the study of culture.
D. J. Austin-Broos, ed. Pp. 89-106. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
HUXLEY, T. H. 1863 Evidence as to man's place in nature. London: Macmillan.
JONES, E. 1957 The life and work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III. New York: Basic Books.
KARDINER, A. & E. PREBLE 1963 They studied man. New York: Mentor Books.
KLUCKHOHN, C. 1944 The influence of Freud on anthropology in America during the
first one hundred years. In One hundred years of American psychiatry. J. Hall, G. Zil-
boorg and H. Bunker, eds. Pp. 489-617. New York: Columbia University Press.
KLUCKHOHN, C. 1957 The impact of Freud on anthropology. In Freud in contemporary cul-
ture. I. Goldstein, ed. Pp. 66-72. New York: International Universities Press.
KUSPIT, D. 1989 A mighty metaphor: The analogy of archaeology and psycholanalysis. In
Sigmund Freud and art: His personal collection of antiquities. L. Gamwell and R. Wells,
eds. Pp. 133-151. New York: State University of New York and London: Freud
Museum.
LARTET, E. & H. CHRISTY 1865-75 Reliquiae aquitanicae, being contributions to the archaeology
and palaeontology of Périgord and the adjoining provinces of southern France. London.
LUBBOCK, J. 1865 Prehistoric times. London: Williams and Norgate.
LUBBOCK, J. 1870 The origin of civilisation and the primitive condition of man. London: Long-
mans, Green.
LYELL, C. 1830-33 Principles of geology: Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the
earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation. 3 vols. London: Murray.
MALINOWSKI, B. 1927 Sex and repression in savage society. London: Kegan Paul.
MASSON, J. M. 1984 Freud: The assault on truth. Freud's suppression of the seduction theory.
London: Faber and Faber.
MALCOLM, J. 1984 In the Freud archives. London: Jonathan Cape.
MEAD, M. 1930 An ethnologist's footnote to Totem and taboo. Psychoanalytic Review 17:297-
304.
MEAD, M. 1963 Totem and taboo considered with respect. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
27:185-199.
MORGAN, L. H. 1877 Ancient society. New York: Holt.
REINACH, S. 1905-1912 Cultes, mythes et religions. 4 vols. Paris: Leroux.
RENFREW, C. & P. BAHN 1991 Archaeology: Theories, methods and practice. London: Thames
and Hudson.
RITVO, L. 1972 Carl Claus as Freud's professor of the new Darwinian biology. International
Journal of Psycho-analysis 53:277-283.
RITVO, L. 1974 The impact of Darwin on Freud. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43:172-192.
SCHLIEMANN, H. 1976 [1884] Troja: Results of the latest researches and discoveries on the site of
Homer's Troy, 1882. New York : Arno Press.
SCHRIRE, C. 1980 An inquiry into the evolutionary status and apparent identity of San
hunter-gatherers. Human Ecology 8:9-32.
SPAIN, D. H. 1992 Oedipus Rex or edifice wrecked? Some comments on the universality of
Oedipality and on the cultural limitations of Freud's thought. In Psychoanalytic
anthropology after Freud: Essays marking the fiftieth anniversary of Freud's death. D. H.
Spain, ed. Pp. 198-224. New York: Psyche Press.
SPENCER, H. 1855 Social statics: Or, the conditions essential to human happiness specified, and
the first of them developed. London: Macmillan.
TRIGGER, B. 1989 A history of archaeological thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
TYLOR, E. B. 1871 Primitive culture. London: Murray.
WALLACE, E. R. 1983 Freud and anthropology: A history and reappraisal. New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press.

Freud and Archaeology PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Freud and Archaeology PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [University of Western Australia]

On: 21 March 2014, At: 08:45

Anthropological Forum: A Journal

Freud and archaeology

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.1996.9967466

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Freud and archaeology

Anthropological Forum Volume 7, Number 3,1996

American anthropologists are more likely to consider archaeological aspects than

Freud's interest in archaeology...

Freud's life spans the development of modern archaeology. When he was

gists had begun to employ stratigraphy as a dating method, and Darwin's

Even more obscurely, his antiques seemed reminders of a lost world to

In his discussion of Freud's use of archaeological metaphors (see below), Kuspit

A theatrical pitch to the public at large—the unintellectual crowd. The

Freud's appeal to archaeology can be regarded as an effort to ingratiate

Archaeology symbolises psychoanalysis at its most debunking and revolu-

There is something smugly triumphant in Freud's [1930] assertion of psy-

If we need metaphors, then perhaps we ought to reconsider his own. Freud

The archaeological metaphor, as it has been called, is pervasive in Freud's

In his first full-length analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria (Fraulein

In face of the incompleteness of my analytic results, I had no choice but to

Freud wished to explain to one of his patients, an obsessional neurotic immor-

I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences

pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I

A quite elaborate metaphor comparing the preservation of memories in the

By shifting the emphasis from an actual world of sadness, misery, and

In hysteria, too, there exists a similar possibility of penetrating from the

made in another field of work.

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest

'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'

largely intertwined with the development of modern concepts of geology and

a notable exponent of Darwinian theory, and had acquired most of Darwin's

For both of them are at bottom heritages, abbreviated recapitulations of the

case of human beings...this phylogenetic point of view is partly veiled by

Freud and the past

Totem and Taboo

attempt to summarise it here.

Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us

Here we see an appeal to archaeological evidence ('inanimate monuments and

Freud, however, was himself aware of the paradox involved:

take for granted.

concern whatsoever for archaeological evidence. Morgan's construct (from Ancient

Lower savagery: From the emergence of man to the discovery of fire.

Civilisation: From the invention of the alphabet and writing.

and...that function's only information upon endopsychic processes was

There is no doubt that Freud saw symbolism in language as being universal to

complex' (PFL 13:219).

A 1915 'Evolution of civilisation and its neurotic parallels'

Anxiety hysteria: The privations of the Ice Age.

While this is not terribly convincing, to the archaeologist at least, it is of interest

Moses and monotheism

recovery of the Indus civilisations at Mohenjo-daro. Another interesting aside,

You might also like