Published in Anthropological Forum 7 (1996): 419-438.
FREUD AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Sandra Bowdler
Centre for Archaeology
University of Western Australia
Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx formed the intellectual triumvirate 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 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 archaeological 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 archaeological 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 and 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 civilization.
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 Malinowski’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 (eg. Kluckholn 1944, 1957; Mead 1930, 1963; Herskovits 1934), that is, when it has been discussed by anthropologists and not by psychoanalysts and their congeners (but see also Hiatt 1987). 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 profitable 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, geologists 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 Gymnasium 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 archaeologist’s study. Here were all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the layman recognized as archaeological finds...” (Gay 1988). Freud followed accounts of excavations of the day in the press, acquiring Schliemann’s Troja (1884) in 1899, and referring to Evans's work at Knossos (1901) in Totem and Taboo (1913).
...and explanations of it
Some psychoanalytical theorists see Freud's culture-historical orientation contributing 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, 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 civilization. .. 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 ancestral 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 treasure” 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 respectability, 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 demonstration of the reality of its heroes, the facts that informed the legend - gave archaeology a special celebrity, an honoured social place: it was an adventure 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 symbolizes psychoanalysis at its most debunking and revolutionary...
There is something smugly triumphant in Freud's [1930] assertion of psychoanalysis'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-knowledge (Spain 1992: 219-220) .
... no close student of Freud has been able to escape this convenient and powerful 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 psychoanalysis - a way of disseminating and even popularizing 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 and 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 8:41)
Freud wished to explain to one of his patients, an obsessional neurotic immortalized 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 unconscious 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 preservation; 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 Civilization 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 underpins 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 relationship 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 columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning 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 discoveries 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 loquuntur! (Freud 1896: 252-3).
But the stones are made to speak by a technique abandoned by the later archaeological 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 excavating 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 metaphorical 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 uniformitarianism and the work of Darwin and his successors, particularly T. H. Huxley, 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 and Bahn 1991: 24).
Freud was extremely dependent on the concepts of Darwin, and of the German evolutionist Haeckel, 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), Freud had become familiar with the work of the evolutionary anthropologists Lubbock, Spencer and Tylor (PFL [Pelican Freud Library] 4:58).
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 elaborate 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) 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 prehistory too ... It seems to me ... that symbolic connections, which the individual has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a phylogenetic heritage" (PFL 1:234).
In his discussion of the two courses of development of the ego and the libido in lecture 22, Freud (1916-17) 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 a 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. (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 [1]. "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 constitution 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, 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 (eg 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 civilization. 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 "civilization", 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 agreement 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 organization, 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 substitute 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 (ie. 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 imagination. 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 worshipped 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 'primitive' 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 footnoted 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 civilized races. ... The determination of the original state of things thus invariably remains a matter of construction. (PFL 13:161n).
Wallace (1983:109 n.3) 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 'civilized' people, a mental difference, fundamental 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 undeniably a form of unilinear evolution but its determinants are quite different from those of Frazer et al [2].
Having said the above, Freud proceeded to ransack the ethnography of Australian 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 etc..
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 twentieth century.
I wish to pursue two other lines of thought. Firstly, 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 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 was 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 recognized as being of evolutionary significance. After the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), and of course The Descent of Man (1871), not to mention Huxley’s Evidence of 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 "Pithecanthropus": 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 Civilization (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 elaborated on by Edoard Lartet, de Mortillet and others; Breuil's first work on cave art appeared in 1912. The Neolithic was still at this time seen as characterised by polished stone artefacts; Childe was yet to turn the spotlight onto the origins of agriculture and animal domestication as a significant cultural "revolution" (1925, The Dawn of European Civilization). 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 S. 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 and Christy, de Mortillet, the findings of Du Bois, 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, Tylor and Morgan. 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 "primitive" 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, itself 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.
Civilization: from the invention of the alphabet and writing.
What however qualified as "man"? This is not a problem which 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 civilized. 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 anticipate 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 civilizations, however, "levels" can be assessed (PFL 13:156).
I have tried to construct a Freudian scheme for cultural/psychological evolution 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 which 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 language 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 (eg. 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 religion 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 civilization 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). Civilization, 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 comes 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 attitude 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 [which] has persisted for many thousands of years and [which] 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 prehistory of the mind and a single prehistoric event of psychological significance. In the end he concluded that neurotics are inhibited, ie. civilized, 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 Civilization 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 recapitulated 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 by Freud I have come across to the Ice Age, and in that it makes clear his view that the primal horde came after it. If Freud was at all au fait 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 evolution 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 overpopulation 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 recognizable 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 III'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 repository 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 characteristic 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 civilization, and the increasing renunciation of instinct. There is an interesting digression on the relationship between epic poetry and "lost civilizations", 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 civilizations at Mohenjo-daro. Another interesting aside, particularly with regard to historical circumstances of the time, is Freud's observation 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 opinions. "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 altogether, 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 archaeology or hominid evolution, but it probably would not have helped him much. Given also Freud's concept of the distinctions between "primitive" and "civilized", and his posited relationship of the former to the truly "primal", his use of ethnography to explicate prehistory seems to me to be rather better thought out than, for instance, Graham Clark's 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.
ABBREVIATION USED
PFL = Pelican Freud Library, 15 vols, ed. Angela Richards for Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
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 Societies, held in Darwin, August-September, 1988. I am grateful for 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 and others now buried in my unconscious; I thank them all.
1. In the sense that although Mendel had by this time published his breeding experiments, the concepts involved were not widely accepted until well into the 20th century.
2. “Modern researches into the early history of man, conducted on different lines, have converged with almost irresistible force on the conclusion that all civilized 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 and Preble (1963: 80-81).
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