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NEGOTIATIONS OF SURFACE: ARCHAEOLOGY WITHIN THE EARLY STRATA OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freuds The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896) begins with the description of an excavation. With this passage as a point of departure, the role of archaeology in Freuds early psychoanalytic formulations is examined. The archaeological imagery in his later writings and the collection of ancient objects that came to fill his consulting room and library are well known, but the passage must be contextualized in its own moment to show the influences that led Freud to articulate an expanse of ruins at this particular time. In the late nineteenth century, archaeology provided an innovative representation of topographyone that exceeded the limitations of this concept in neuroanatomical visualizations and that offered the layered site as an analogy for psychic processes. Schliemanns highly publicized excavations of Troy are recognized as an important but not exclusive source for Freuds narrative of 1896. The additional, perhaps dominant, impact of Austrian archaeological projects in the 1880s and 1890s is noted. These enjoyed considerable visibility in Vienna, and were used by Freud to symbolize the processes of destruction and rebuilding in the city itself. The excavation imagery in Aetiology is thus posited as the continuation of a complexity of meanings that Freud brought early on to his engagement with acts of unearthing.

s Freud began to formulate a language to convey his concepts of psychic functioning and began to describe the individual who

Graduate faculty, Tufts University / School of the Museum of Fine Arts; affiliate scholar member, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. This paper received the 2002 Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture of the American Psychoanalytic Associations Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST). The author acknowledges the Committee for International Exchange of Scholars for the support offered her as the Fulbright / Sigmund Freud Society Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis for 20012002 and to colleagues at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, and the University of Vienna, who contributed generously to the work done during that period. Submitted for publication December 19, 2002.

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would be known as the psychoanalyst, he sought a vocabulary that would make his work accessible to colleagues, patients, and readers. Casting his net broadly, he gathered in various scientific, literary, and cultural references. By examining an instance of this process from an early moment in Freuds writing, The Aetiology of Hysteria, first presented as a lecture in April 1896, this paper will reveal the ways in which terminology and imagery from another field, archaeology, became an intriguingly powerful presence. Retrospectively, Freuds use of the nomenclature of excavation has come to be known as the archaeological metaphor, which has occasioned an impressive bibliography and a variety of interpretive positions. Writings on the subject have afforded an opportunity to reflect on (Kuspit 1989; Stockreiter 1998) and in some instances critique (Hake 1993; Spence 1987) the use of archaeological imagery as a structuring element of psychoanalytic formulations. Each instance of Freuds turn to antiquity should be situated within the moment of its evocation, if we are to gain insight into the motivations and meanings that accompanied his use of archaeology. Rather than regarding his first detailed description of an excavation, in the presentation of 1896, as the originary link in a metaphoric chain, this paper will enable the reader to experience the multilayered associations that Freud brought to this particular description of an act of unearthing. It is significant to recall that archaeology was constituent not only of Freuds rhetorical sphere but also of his working space, as documented by Edmund Engelmans well-known photographs (1976) of the library and consulting room at Berggasse 19. Objects that Freud amassed from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and western Asia have occasioned a substantial amount of scholarship in the past two decades (Barker 1996; Gamwell 1989; Gubel 1993; Marinelli 1998). A number of authors have addressed the impact of ancient material at the site of psychoanalysis, reminding the reader that excavation, rather than exhibition, was the stimulus for his collection. This paper, in examining Freuds interests prior to his first acquisitions, is itself something of a prehistory. It traces the archaeological influences, some considerably predating the lecture, that may have informed his thinking, as well as events occurring around the time the lecture was written and presented. The audience for The Aetiology of Hysteria was, from Freuds perspective, an extremely signif icant gathering. The Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, chaired by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, drew much of its constituency from the senior ranks of the University of

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Vienna. It was to this world that Freud aspired to belong, despite the ongoing intensification of anti-Semitic policies within the Ministry of Education (McGrath 1986, p. 125). The occasion of the Aetiology lecture provided Freud an important opportunity both to introduce the findings and processes of his still-youthful field and to make visible his persona as a new investigator of the distant past. These introductions would take place in the context of a subject that was highly fraught, for the origins of hysteria were then an issue of considerable debate and disagreement. The paper drew on certain of his earlier writings, some already published in journals that would have been accessible to members of the audience. Two articles that had been completed in February 1896 were particularly formative: Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses (Freud 1896c) and Further Remarks on the Neuropsychoses of Defence (Freud 1896b). In Heredity, in print since March, Freud had specifically noted that although hereditary determinism had subordinated sexual factors in neurotic symptomatology, his work would not do so: What gives its distinctive character to my line of approach is that I elevate these sexual influences to the rank of specific causes (1896c, p. 149). Regarding the cause of hysteria, Freud was unequivocalsexual abuse committed by another person, occurring in earliest youthbefore the ages of eight to ten (1896c, p. 152). An elaboration of this thesis, with case studies, constituted his Further Remarks. It is thus probable that many in the audience were already acquainted with Freuds position. In the year after the lecture, Freud would himself resituate the causes of hysteria, moving from an etiology based on sexual assault to one of infantile sexual fantasy. The analyst /excavator, found in two works on hysteria prior to 1897 (in addition to Aetiology, there was a brief allusion in 1895), would continue to appear in Freuds writings through the next four decades, culminating in a final explication in Constructions in Analysis, published in December 1937, at the close of his life. Thus, the issues that stimulated the archaeological analogy articulated in The Aetiology of Hysteria would not disappear with Freuds consequential and controversial revision concerning sexual trauma in childhood. Rather, it seems that what constituted ancient and long-forgotten ruins was transformed from historical events to intrapsychic dramas; this transformation allowed the narrative of excavation to continue, with the material retrieved at the site simply shifting from one evidential modality to

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another. It is therefore particularly important to scrutinize the genesis of archaeological imagery, as it persisted long after the issues that stimulated its initial use had themselves become, even for Freud, buried fragments. After opening The Aetiology of Hysteria with some perfunctory allusions to heredity and its limitations in the construction of an etiology (thus positioning himself at a distance from his mentor, JeanMartin Charcot), Freud orchestrated a swift transition in both content and locale, proceeding to lead his listeners through a detailed archaeological scenario:
Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with the remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-ef faced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitantsperhaps semibarbaric peoplewho 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 himand 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 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! [The stones talk!] [Freud 1896a, p. 192].

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This excavation site appears to be a pastiche of several locations woven into the narrative to extol the accomplishments of archaeological endeavors. Freud stated his intention quite explicitly when he introduced his description as an analogy taken from an advance that has in fact been made in another field of work (p. 192). He chose images, such as a treasure-house or stones bearing bilingual inscriptions, that would conjure up popular associations with places whose ancient objects, although found well before the mid-1890s, continued to hold considerable appeal: Troy and Rosetta. There was also a third site that deserves consideration here, one that historically has been not been

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associated with Freuds interest in decipherment and unearthing. The Austrian-led excavations at Ephesus, begun in 1895, reached an apogee in the weeks preceding the Aetiology lecture, with the identification of ruins belonging to the legendary temple of Artemis. Thus, in joining his nascent psychoanalytic processes to those of archaeology for the benefit of his Viennese listeners, Freud may have hoped to exploit a moment of particular, localized receptivity. Ephesus shared with Troy and Rosetta recognition as a site where important ancient evidence was recovered from an expanse of often indistinguishable fragments. In each case, concealment was a decisive factor; only after systematic, empirical examinations could material be transformed into reconstructed documents of events long past. In Freuds fable, disrupting a seemingly unassailable surface distinguishes the actions of the traveler from those of the excavator; the same distinction, he argues, separates those satisfied with merely identifying the symptom from more intrepid investigators who, as he goes on to note in the Aetiology lecture, would be willing to induce these surface fragments to make themselves heard as witnesses to the history of the origins of the illness (1896a, p. 192). The words saxa loquunturthe stones talkwhich conclude Freuds archaeological passage, form what appears to be an appropriate bridge between his narrative of unearthing and the processes he will introduce in order to reveal the origins of hysteria. This seemingly transparent flourish was a Latinized phrase originating among the classically educated of nineteenth-century Europe. Encountering it today, we situate it in the familiar context of psychoanalysis and archaeology, where these words bespeak a shared goal of deciphering and thus reconstructing a lost history. However, the phrase is accessible also in another script, one that would readily have been known to the original audience, but has now become all but illegible: saxa loquuntur also translates into a statement about the urban topography of Vienna itself. This phrase was the name given the Rathaus, Viennas City Hall, by its architect, Friedrich Schmidt (Czeike 1983, p. 32).1 Begun in 1873, the Rathaus was one of several distinguished civic spaces created to mark the expansion of what then was envisaged as a modern, liberal city (Planner-Steiner 1978). The vast building campaign of the
1 The author acknowledges Lydia Marinelli, Research Director of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Vienna, for calling my attention to the fact that saxa loquuntur was the name Schmidt chose for the Rathaus project.

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1870s and 1880s would include the Parliament, the Opera, and the State Theater, as well as the City Hall. These grand structures were to be located along the Ringstrasse, created to replace the medieval walls of the inner city. Viennas population had dramatically increased in the decade before the Rathauss construction, with the opening of the Hapsburg capital to populations from throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thousands of Jewish families, like Freuds, came to Vienna from virtually every part of the empire: Hungary, Moravia (Freuds birthplace), Galicia, Bohemia, and Romania (Beller 1989; Rozenblit 1983); they were joined by Poles, Czechs, and others. With this dramatic influx into what had been for many centuries a walled, rather small urban space, Viennas civic buildings became increasingly inadequate. The competition for the design of the City Hall attracted sixty-four entrants, from Vienna and other European cities (Czeike 1983, p. 14). The winner was announced in October 1869. Schmidt, although of German birth, was a Viennese resident and the designer of several other large projects in the city. By naming his submission Saxa loquuntur (Hauer 1992, p. 6), the architect appeared to be underscoring the buildings capacity to speak the values of the new city that it would represent. It is important to note that although Schmidt took his inspiration from the stylistic idiom of the Gothic architecture of medieval Europe, his source was the town halls of the free cities of the Middle Ages, which were explicitly secular and not ecclesiastic. As Carl Schorske (1980) has observed, Thus to evoke its origins as a free medieval commune, now reborn after a long night of absolutist rule, liberal Vienna built its Rathaus in massive Gothic (p. 37). The long process of construction spanned the years of Freuds young adulthood. The foundation stone was laid by Emperor Franz Josef in June 1873, a month before Freud completed secondary school in preparation for entry that fall into the university. By the time that the keystone, which marked the buildings completion, was put in place ten years later, Freud had finished his medical studies and become engaged to Martha Bernays, and was working at Viennas General Hospital. Although the Rathaus may have been intended to dispel the long night of absolutist rule, any allusion to it by the mid-1890s would have carried for Freud the intensification of an already profound antiSemitism, with the rise of the Christian Socials coalition. By the time he presented his paper, a diverse but powerful alliance (composed of

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members of the old aristocracy, working-class emigrs from Eastern Europe, ultranationalists, and elements of the clergy) had control of City Hall. Perhaps they were the people who had apparently forgotten, to echo Freud, the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. To recall what has been hidden from sight, one must go beneath the surface and reclaim the stones that carry the lost language of liberal modernity. The earliest appearances of archaeology in Freuds work reveal an engagement with excavation as the rupture of an existing terrain, making visible what lies beyond and beneath its perceptible limits. The ability to document this disruption as an empirical process was one of the most lauded accomplishments of archaeology in the 1880s and 1890s, coinciding with the period when Freud was confronting the limits of representation in the discourse of the neurosciences, as well as, increasingly, the limits he faced as a Jew in Vienna (Gilman 1993). Five years before Aetiology, Freud had used another analogy that spoke to the citys landscape, although here he had recalled an earlier, more promising moment of Viennese urbanity. Writing about moving into unoccupied cerebral territory in On Aphasia, Freud (1891) compared the process with the manner in which a city expands by settlements in areas outside its walls [Ringmauren ] (p. 58). Valerie Greenberg (1997), in her incisive reading of the Aphasia Book, observes the following: This particular metaphor, which is strikingly out of place in its neuroanatomic context, could have been derived from the impression made by Viennas dramatic expansion in the 1860s and 1870s beyond the former fortified walls and eventually beyond the Ringstrasse constructed where the walls had been. The metaphor conjures up the idea of breaking forth, out of a confined space (p. 28). Although it seems strikingly out of place, the allusion to the space beyond the old city may have offered Freud an example of the mutability of ground, with its potential for expanding the confines of existing knowledge. By 1896, his topographic usage had shifted from expansion to excavation, mirroring both the transition in his work from the physiological to the psychical and changes in the political realities of the city in which he lived. Between Aphasia and Aetiology Freud had formulated a new definition for a term shared by neuroscience and archaeology: Schicht (layer or stratum). In the case presentation of Elisabeth von R. in Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, Freud

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described his work with the patient as clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, adding that we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 139). It was a year later that Freud returned to this image in Aetiology. A few pages after the introduction quoted earlier, he noted the analysts need to pursue a systematic, laborious reconstruction of a reversed chronological ordera fact which justifies our comparison of the work with the excavation of a stratified ruined site (1896a, p. 198). In his first use of the archaeological metaphor, given the meaning of saxa loquuntur in Vienna at this time, Freud must have believed that he was not only speaking about a lost landscape, but speaking from within one as well. If there was one individual who served as Freuds model for the excavator in his writings on hysteria in the mid-1890s, it was Heinrich Schliemann. More publicist than archaeologist, Schliemann gained renown not only for his claim to have discovered the lost treasures of Troy, but also for achieving for archaeology a recognition comparable to that awarded contemporary topographic investigations in geology and botany. Although Guiseppe Fiorelli, the excavator of Pompeii in the 1860s, was acknowledged as one of the pioneers of stratigraphical analysis (Daniel 1950, p. 165) and although the German excavations at Olympia were exemplary in establishing the presence of clearly delineated, layered reconstructions in the mid-1870s, it was Schliemann who brought popularity and intrigue to the concept of Trmmerschichten (layered ruins). Although Freud did not purchase the 1881 German translation of Schliemanns Ilios: The City and the Country of the Trojans (1880) until 1899, Schliemanns exploits beneath the Turkish soil were rendered virtually folkloric by the extensive coverage accorded them in the Viennese press.2 Scholars both past (Michaelis 1906) and present (Traill 1995) have critiqued Schliemanns often flagrant disregard of the stratigraphic integrity of the site he claimed to preserve. Yet the concept of the stratified buried city became virtually synonymous with him; it was
2 Schliemanns relationship with the European and American press has been widely discussed (see, e.g., Deuel 1977; Traill 1995). For citations to the coverage of Schliemanns activities in Vienna, refer to Gamwell (1989, p. 29, n. 3) and Zintzen (1998, p. 263, n. 14). It appears that Schliemann followed the presentation of his work in the Viennese press, specifically in the Neue Freie Presse. Examples of his comments can be found in letters written to his friend Rudolf Virchow (Schliemann 1991, entries 348, 577).

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said that every person of culture and education lived through the drama of the discovery of Troy. The fact that Freud chose to situate his Aetiology narrative in a little-known region that resonates with Schliemanns description of Troy should therefore not be surprising. The ruins of Homers Ilium, its discoverer claimed, went unrecognized for centuries by those who journeyed there. Schliemann disdainfully attributed this oversight to his precedessors satisfaction with only a very superficial inspection of the visible terrain (Schliemann 1880, p. 184). Numerous gold objects, proclaimed to be Priams Treasure named by the excavator for the king said to have ruled during the Trojan War and cited by Freud in a letter to Fliess of 1899 (Freud 1985, p. 353)became the most widely known of the finds associated with the site. This material is the probable source for the treasure-house mentioned in Freuds archaeological description at the outset of his lecture. The retrieval of these objects suggests itself as a prototype for the unearthing of the psychic landscape of hysteria as Freud envisaged it in 1896. Schliemann reported that he had extracted the cache intact from a thick layer of debris (p. 41) and that according to his assessment the treasure had been packed together in antiquity at a moment of supreme peril (p. 41). He was able to excavate this treasure that had been hidden for millennia only after digging through masses of rubbish and the thick-walled fortifications of later occupation. In order to heighten the drama of the find, Schliemann emphasized the difficulties involved in securing these objects, presenting the task to his readers as one that would have daunted a less determined excavator. For Schliemann, indivisible from his ability to reveal the gold and buildings of Ilios was his capacity to access evidence of occupation in clearly delineated layers comparable to the geological strata famously identified by Charles Lyell in the 1860s. Unlike other sites in the vicinity, the mound at Hissarlik (where Schliemann professed to have located the ancient city) was distinguished by a series of successive stratifications that Schliemann claimed to be more evident here than in any other known spot (p. 62). That Schliemanns work served as a model for the capacity to recover what was seemingly lost or mythic has been widely acknowledged. Less examined, however, are the prerogatives that excavators such as Schliemann claimed in order to achieve their access to the distant past. Archaeology created a new discourse of surface, one in which the representation of antiquity emerged from the negotiation of

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topography and stratigraphy. The lands capacity to conceal was now regarded as a decisive feature of the archaeological project. Acts of excavation disrupted this overlay, enabling the recognition of spatial and temporal layers stratigraphically distinguishable yet unified by their shared designation as a site (Daniel 1950). The definition of what constitutes a location was complicated by this coexistence of place and stratum, whose relationship could be determined only by a process of reconstruction. The re-creation of ancient sites, the distinguishing constituent of modern archaeology, had become essential for the representability of both the excavated material and a conception of a distant past (Zintzen 1998). The processes of excavation and interpretation were seen as a scientific method for the study of objects, structures, and inscriptions, as well as the very land itself.3 Archaeologists distinguished themselves from earlier travelers by an ability to alter the existing environment in order to fully expose its meanings. Both the modernity and the implicit colonialism of this endeavor were frequently shown through the visualization of excavations in photographs that documented the processes and mechanisms for the retrieval of objects, as well as the use of native peoples labor. The representation of these disrupted surfaces was also articulated in new forms of stratigraphic mapping. Such topographic innovations may have allowed Freud analogous access to issues of concealment, preservation, and reconstruction; they also provided a precedent for the subject position of the analyst as one who enters the patients landscape. Schliemanns desire to promote a heightened awareness of his discoveries had already brought the archaeological specifics of Troy into the field of popular representation in the preceding two decades, thus providing a readily accessible and established source for Freud to draw on in depicting the mechanisms and treatment of hysteria. The discourses of surface and strata, places where archaeology shared a vocabulary familiar to Freud from physiology, may have afforded a fluidity of meaning; Schliemanns term Schicht, used to describe the strata at
3 This assessment is not exclusive to recent scholarship. An earlier, and certainly a less critical, version of this idea was offered by Michaelis (1906) in his text on archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century. This work, found in Freuds library, characterized the task of modern archaeology as scientifically working over an entire geographical location, rather than excavating an individual object or structure, as had been the case prior to the 1870s. It is interesting that Michaelis identifies Alexander Conze, who initiated the first Austrian excavation and who was the teacher of Freuds friend Emanuel Lwy, as the first to recognize and to remedy this defect (p. 116).

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Hissarlik, was one that Freud would have encountered frequently as a designation for the brains cortical surface. From the case of Elisabeth von R., he added a new reading, that of a psychical layer. In the year after the introduction of this term, Freud argued in his Aetiology that what is really operative traumatically in hysteria can be accessed only through a laborious process that parallels the excavation detailed at the outset of his presentation. The distance between symptom and source is considerable; this would echo Schliemann, who claimed that the surface fragments at modern-day Troy gave little indication of the vast structures that lay buried beneath them. But the archaeological activities that Freud used to begin his exploration of hysteria suggest that the inaccessibility of the past occurs through more than the stratified distance between the contemporary manifestations and the originary event. He also offers an analogy for his contention that the mechanisms of trauma create codes of concealed meaning, thus requiring the analyst to exercise a form of psychic decipherment. In the sentences that immediately follow his opening scenario, Freud observes that symptoms of hysteria are reproduced . . . in the form of mnemic symbols (1896a, p. 193). These representations then congeal into what become monuments erected to commemorate events (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 253), an image that Freud elucidated when he revisited Studies on Hysteria in the first of his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud 1910). Such decoding also features in the Aetiology passage, where it is only through the presence of two scripts that the excavator is able to read the texts, thus accessing the events that motivated the structures creation. Freuds inclusion of bilingual inscriptions in the passage has occasioned comments (Hake 1993; Weiss and Weiss 1989; Wolf 1971) about the influence of Jean Franois Champollions decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, an act credited with bringing legibility to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Certainly Freud would have assumed that his audience was aware of this occurrence, still a focus of attention nearly a century after an officer in Napoleons army had found that fragment of a stela containing two languages and three scripts in Rashid (Rosetta), a village near Alexandria. The text of the inscription is a priestly decree and homage of 196 B . C . E ., marking the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and citing the projects created to commemorate him. Thus, the Rosetta stone would have been useful for Freuds presentation in

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two respects: it offered an analogous achievement in complex decipherment, and it supported the comparison with the hysterics construction of intrapsychic monuments for the preservation of past events. The achievement of Champollion may also have had resonance with the vast number of ancient objects that eventually f illed the space of Freuds office. Over the couch in the consulting room, he would hang a watercolor by Ernst Koemer of the temple of Ramses (Ramesses) II at Abu Simbel. The placement of this image in such a prominent position has occasioned speculation about the possible relationship between Abu and the Hebrew word abi (my father). Henry Fischer (1966), who drew attention to this similarity several decades ago, noted that Freud may not have been conscious of this homonymic relationship, suppressing as he did his own oedipal feelings (p. 591). Although this possibility is difficult to assess, there is a familial presence in these rooms at Berggasse 19 that seems indisputable. Freuds father, Jacob, had introduced his son to the imagery of antiquity in an illustrated biblical text. they read together during Sigmunds childhood, and there are unmistakable references to this imagery among the objects Freud collected (see Rizzuto 1998; Rosenfeld 1956). However, the primacy that Freud accorded the image of Abu Simbel may have suggested an influence other than (or in addition to) his paternal relationship. Perhaps the most significant breakthrough in Champollions decipherment of hieroglyphics, using values of sound and script, was reading the name Ramesses from a bas-relief rubbing taken from Abu Simbel. Freud may have used this monument as an emblem for the capacity to decipher a seemingly inaccessible symbology, one that he resituated in the archaeologized site of the analytic encounter. It is interesting to note that in the consulting room the stratum below Koemers image of Abu Simbel reveals itself to be the location of the couch. By comparing his analytic fieldwork with Troys stratigraphy and Rosettas symbology, Freud situated his own unearthings among historical achievements that were well established and indisputable. It is noteworthy, however, that at the moment of his Aetiology lecture March and April of 1896the most significant excavations were occurring under Viennese control, at the ruins of Ephesus. The influence of this site has thus far been overlooked in the literature addressing the relationship between archaeology and psychoanalysis. This neglect is rather surprising, since Austrian archaeological

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activities were highly visible in the public sphere of the museum, lecture hall, and university. Viennese excavators made particularly extensive use of visual imagery, such as site photography and architectural reconstructions, earning themselves the distinction of creating the first modern excavation report in history (Daniel 1950, p. 166). This documentation included images of worksites, complete with local people laboring with picks and shovels, such as those described in Freuds narrative. The activities at the site, as well as the record of the stratigraphy and contents of the excavation, were all part of creating the complete record for which Austrian practices were particularly praised. The belief in modernitys capacity to visualize all aspects of a distant past was strongly held by the archaeologist Alexander Conze, a contemporary of Schliemann, who for many years was a professor of classical studies at the University of Vienna. Between 1873 and 1875, Conze led the first Austrian excavations, which occurred on the Greek island of Samothrke. It was Conzes vision that archaeology could take on the exalted task of uncovering and comprehending whole cities and landscapes, from images and inscriptions to the most insignificant potsherd. Nothing was too small or insignif icant (Marchand 1996, p. 143). Although Conze later left Austria, moving on to excavate for the German Archaeological Institute at the famous Hellenistic site of Pergamum, his influence remained strong in Vienna, where quantifiable data and contemporary technologies were by then highly valued. In creating the first modern archaeological report, Conze also dramatically re-presented the image of the excavation. From romanticized ruins in pastoral landscapes that were often indebted to scenes from neoclassical painting, the site was transformed into a setting for scientific investigations amid the backdrop of fragments and strata (a term whose meaning for Austrian f ieldwork was introduced at Samothrke). This concept of a layered location as the whole landscape, where nothing was too small or insignificant, may have influenced Freuds early discussions of psychic topography. The concept resonates in The Aetiology of Hysteria, where Freud (1896a) speaks of experiences that are insignificant in themselves (p. 194) but ultimately invaluable in reconstructing the stratified ruined site. It is also worth noting that the idea of a written narrative of an excavation may have provided a precedent for Freuds own reports of his analytic unearthings. Freuds introduction to the archaeological climate of Vienna most likely occurred in the context of a friendship with one of Conzes

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students. Emanuel Lwy participated in a seminar in 1876, after Conzes second season at Samothrke, and this experience influenced Lwys choice of career (Wolf 1998). By then he had known Freud for at least two years (the circumstances of their initial meeting are not documented), during which time they, along with two fellow students, Siegfried Lipiner and Josef Paneth, founded a philosophical journal (Freud 1990, p. 73). Although their literary efforts faltered, the friendship between Freud and Lwy endured. Their contact continued even through the years 1889 to 1915, when Lwy held a professorship in archaeology at the University of Rome. In 1897, a year after writing Aetiology, Freud wrote to Fliess that Lwy had been back visiting friends and family, as he did every year, and usually keeps me up until three in the morning (Freud 1985, pp. 277278). Lwy assisted Freud in his collection of objects and was a valued resource for archaeological information throughout their lifelong association (Wolf 1998). Emanuel Lwy died in February 1938, only months before Freud was forced to flee Vienna. As a student during the 1880s, Lwy took part in excavations at Turkish sites organized by Conzes successor, Otto Benndorf. The press featured stories about these events and detailed the public lectures that Benndorf delivered to Viennese audiences. Strongly committed to the use of site photography (following Conzes precedent) and plaster casts, Benndorf frequently included these modes of documentation in his lectures (Hubert Szemethy, private communication). Benndorfs visibility and advocacy increased the perception in Vienna that modern archaeology, although a discourse of distant localities and temporalities, was nevertheless able to visualize fully its contemporary practices and objects (as excavated fragments, plaster reproductions, and photographs). Thus, well before positing the psychoanalytic formulations that John Forrester (1980) characterized as the archaeology of the living (p. 2), Freud may have been influenced by the claims of representability of the past that were becoming the prerogative of the excavator. Benndorf created a specific concept of archaeology as work. Thus, when Freud speaks in the opening moments of his lecture of an advance that has in fact been made in another field of work (1896a, p. 192), he may be citing a scientific pursuit whose value as a credible labor had already been established. In his Aetiology narrative, the term that Strachey translates as explorer (Forscher) is perhaps better

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rendered as investigator or researcher. For Freud, a scientism of antiquity could offer a model for psychical investigationand a recognized site for the production of empirical knowledgedistinct from the techniques of the physiology laboratory. As noted above, the collections within the consulting room and library at Berggasse 19 created a work space rather than an area of display. For the educated Viennese whom Freud envisaged as his patients, archaeological associations would lend his procedures the prestige of a modern investigation. Benndorf exerted tireless ef forts in his promotional activities, as noted in one of his obituary notices in the Neue Freie Presse (January 2, 1907), which recalls his constant willingness to win over and to excite more circles for antiquity. This campaign resulted in more broadly based support for the activities of the emerging Austrian Archaeological Institute. It was Benndorf who, by excavating Ephesus, achieved a credible Viennese equivalent to Schliemanns Ilios. With Hapsburg and Ottoman emissaries attending and with funds of fered by the Austrian aristocracy, Benndorf was given the rights to excavate due south of Troy in June 1894 (Wiplinger and Wlach 1995). Although the British had been a presence at Ephesus since the 1870s, the Austrians were granted a far more formal licensure, one that would link Vienna to this Turkish city for the next century (Scherrer 1995; Wiplinger and Wlach 1995). Ephesus, settled by the Ionians as early as the tenth century B.C.E., seemed to possess a particular capacity for the remarkable. The city had the distinction of containing the late classical period temple of Artemisknown as the Artemisionwhich was so magnif icent that it was accorded ancient recognition as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. In the late second century B.C.E., a Greek visitor noted that the city was famed for three things: the size of the temple, surpassing all buildings among men, the eminence of the city of the Ephesians, and the renown of the goddess who dwells there (Pausanias 1971, p. 43). Its fame as a great cult center, with impressive wooden statuary of Artemis, who had originally been associated with trees, and massive temples and civic buildings, contributed to its allure as a challenging archaeological treasure. Objects from the initial season of fieldwork arrived in Vienna in the autumn of 1895. The second season of excavation, involving some of the most significant ruins of the Artemision, virtually coincided with Freuds lecture of April 1896; much important archaeological work had taken place in March, only weeks before the presentation. It therefore

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seems highly plausible that a reference to archaeology at this time would appeal to a heightened awareness of Viennas particular contributions to this emerging science, and even to a nationalist sentiment. Freud later accorded Ephesus the distinction of being the only ancient site on which he based an historical essay Great Is Diana of the Ephsians. Although this short piece did not appear until 1911, its preface explicitly refers to Benndorfs excavations, identifying Ephesus as the site for the exploration of whose ruins, incidentally, our Austrian archaeology has to be thanked (Freud 1911, p. 342). It would not be surprising, therefore, if Freud had considered the strategic value of this site in crafting the preface to his presentation on hysteria. The combination of anticipation and retrospection that has characterized this examination of Freuds use of archaeology to present his new field of work recalls the dual directionality of the stone Janus that was one of his first acquisitions. Focusing on the pivotal Aetiology lecture, this paper has both looked ahead to the well-documented intersections of psychoanalysis and archaeology that followed it and gazed back upon two decades of experiences that may have informed his metaphoric use of excavation. The multiple readings that can be brought to Freuds narrative of unearthing entwine antiquity and modernity into a landscape that is archaeological, psychical, and political. These surfaces have been construed here as places of concealment, requiring disruptions of the visible in order to recover what has become virtually inaccessible. Among the precedents for Freuds archaeological interests it is important to include Viennese excavations alongside long-recognized locations such as Troy. Poignantly, the most muted of these old stones in Freuds narrative are to be found in Vienna itselfalong the Ringstrassewhere by 1896 the ideology originally represented by the Rathaus was deeply buried and seemingly forgotten. An examination of Freuds development of the archaeological metaphor makes it apparent that the meanings he brought to the image of an expanse of ruins were, even in these earliest days, both compelling and complex.
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