Edmund Engelman. Photograph of Sigmund Freud's Desk. 1938.

Freuds Mexican Antiquities:Psychoanalysis and Human

Sacrifice*

RUBN GALLO

OCTOBER 135, Winter 2011, pp. 7092. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sigmund Freud was an avid collector of antiquities, and over the course ofhis life he acquired over 2,000 archeological pieces: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, andother objects purchased from Viennese dealers who Freud visited during his dailywalks or acquired during his trips to Italy and Greece. Like smoking cigars, col-lecting was a guilty pleasure, one that Freud playfully described as an addiction inlight of the considerable financial and psychological resources it demanded.1

Unlike most collectors, Freud invested his objects not only with exhibitionvalue, but also with use value: his antiquities became instruments for writing, think-ing, and even analyzing patients. He placed his most treasured purchases on hisdesk so he could face them as he wrote, turning them into a captive audience ofsorts.2 Freud spoke to his antiquities, used them as paperweights, and would occa-sionally rub the head of a statuette. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss, he referred to theseobjects as his godsalbeit old and grubby gods.3 During analytic sessions, hewould sometimes point to one of his ancient artifacts to illustrate the workings ofthe unconscious.4 Freud even traveled with his antiquities: every summer the familymoved to the country for several weeks, and the figurines had to be carefullypacked, unpacked, and reinstalled in the new domicile. And when Freud left Viennafor good in 1938, he made the necessary arrangementsincluding securing the

* The material from this article is taken from Freuds Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010). I thank Roger Conover for granting permission to publish anabridged version of the chapter.1. Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), p. 547.2. Lynn Gamwell, A Collector Analyses Collecting: Sigmund Freud on the Passion to Possess,Excavations and Their Objects: Freuds Collection of Antiquity, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996), pp. 112. See also Lynn Gamwell, Sigmund Freud and Art (London: Thames andHudson, 1989).3. Freud to Fliess, August 1, 1899, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 18871904,ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 363. 4. R.E. Money-Kyrle, Looking BackwardsAnd Forwards, International Review of Psycho-Analysis6 (1979), pp. 26572. See also H. D., Tribute to Freud (New York: Pantheon, 1956).

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necessary permits from the Nazi authoritiesso his collection could accompanyhim to London. Princess Marie Bonaparte, his patroness and one-time analysand,smuggled one of the most prized piecesa statuette of Athenaout of Austria.And when the end came, Freuds ashes were deposited in a Greek urn at LondonsGolders Green Crematorium.

Much has been written about Freuds collection, but scholars have tended tofocus on Freuds Greek, Roman, and Egyptian piecesobjects belonging to threecultures the analyst admired and about which he wrote extensively in his essays.5 Thecover of Sigmund Freud and Artthe first major catalogue of Freuds holdingsforinstance, features a winged sphinx, a piece directly related to one of the central theo-ries of psychoanalysis: the Oedipus complex. Critics have tended to read Freudsantiquities as companion pieces to his writings, assuming that he acquired piecesthat illustrated elements of his arguments.

How are we to make sense of the antiquities from other cultures, those with noobvious counterpart in Freuds theories? How are we to read the African, Indian,and Chinese artifacts in his collection? These objects came from places Freud nevervisited or discussed in his work, and their presence in the collection raises an impor-tant question: what role did cultural alterity play in Freuds practice of collecting?And how did he perceive the difference between the various culturesGreek andEgyptian, Chinese and Romanrepresented in his collection?

The question becomes even more complex when it comes to Freuds pre-

5. See, for instance, Griselda Pollock, The Image in Psychoanalysis and the ArchaeologicalMetaphor, in Psychoanalysis and the Image (New York: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 129.

Left: Vase depicting a dignitary.Mochica. Peru, ca. 350 CE. Near right: Kneeling figure. WestMexico. 100 BCE250 CE. Far right: Anthropomorphic idol.Mezcala. West Mexico, 12001500 CE.

Columbian holdings. Freud owned three pieces from American civilizations thatdo not fit into any of the schemas used to interpret the collection: they areatleast at first sightnot related to psychoanalytic texts or concepts, nor do theyseem to have a connection to places, like Greece or Rome, which Freud hadinvested with special significance. One might be tempted to dismiss these piecesas anomalies in a collection that is otherwise coherent and unified. But Freudhimself taught us that every detail, regardless of how small or insignificant itappears, can be interpreted to uncover a web of unsuspected associations.

Freuds pre-Columbian holdings consist of a Moche figure from Peru thathas been described as vase depicting a dignitary and two Mexican objects: a kneel-ing figure from West Mexico and an anthropomorphic stone object from Mezcala.6

These objects have drawn little attention from scholars: they have not beenincluded in most exhibitions of Freuds antiquitiesincluding a show of Freudsantiquities held in a museum in Mexico City! The three pre-Columbian objects havenever been published together or analyzed as a group.7 In the pages that follow, Ipropose to interpret these pieces with the following questions in mind: where didthese objects come from? What role did pre-Columbian art play in Freuds collec-tion? How did these objects influence Freuds perception of the Americas in generaland of Mexico in particular?

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6. Lydia Marinelli, ed., Meine . . . alten und dreckigen Gtter: Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung (Vienna:Strmfeld, 1998), p. 147. 7. The Moche piece and the Mezcala object were published in Meine alten und dreckigen Gtter, p.147; the West Mexican figure was published in Le Sphinx de Vienne: Sigmund Freud, lart et larchologie, ed.Eric Gubel (Brussels: Ludion, 1993), p. 174.

The Objects

Freuds American pieces come from two countries that gave birth to thegreat pre-Columbian civilizations: Peru, home of the Inca Empire, and Mexico,the land of the Maya and the Aztecs. Interestingly, Freuds objects were not cre-ated by any of these empires but by the relatively marginal peoples of WestMexico and the Moche. Freuds pre-Columbian objects share a number of attrib-utes: all three pieces originated in remote areas far from the powerful urbancenters of the Inca and the Aztecs. They were made by peoples who had no writ-ing, left no record of their history or beliefs, and vanished well before the arrivalof the Spaniards. And, perhaps more importantly, all three were funerary objects,designed to be buried alongside the dead in tombs that were looted long beforearchaeologists had the opportunity to explore them. In this respect, the threepre-Columbian pieces fit perfectly in a collection that included many otherexamples of tomb art, from fragments of Egyptian mummies to fragments ofRoman sarcophagi.

But how did these pre-Columbian artifacts make their way from the Americasto Vienna? Freud purchased most of his antiquities from local dealers, but he alsoreceived some as presents from patients and friends. Freud did not keep any recordson the pre-Columbian pieces, and no documents have survived that could explainhow these objects arrived at Berggasse 19, Freuds Viennese address for the lastdecades of his life. The two Mexican objects pose a much greater challenge for thescholar than the Peruvian piece, which some have related to Freuds early work oncocaine. With the exception of a footnote on the Aztecs, Freud never wrote aboutpre-Columbian Mexico.8 And he never had a Mexican disciple who could have sentthe pieces as presents. Freud might have acquired them on his own, but there was vir-tually no market for American antiquities in Vienna before World War II.

The Mexican pieces thus occupy a place in the collection of antiquities thatis as eccentricand as puzzlingas that of the single Mexican book in Freudslibrary.9 How are we to interpret them? How do they relate to the other objects inFreuds collection? Could there be any unsuspected links between these objectsand Freuds theories? Could they provide some clues about the analysts percep-tion of Mexico?

Freuds Mexican Library

Freuds life coincided with an explosion of interest in Aztec Mexico amongAustrian, German, and French intellectuals. In 1916, Walter Benjamin moved toMunich to attend a series of seminars, including one given by the Americanist

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8. Freud, Totem and Taboo: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud(London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 139. 9. See Rubn Gallo, Freuds Mexican Books, in Freuds Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis,pp. 198234.

Walter Lehmann, on the language and culture of ancient Mexico. Benjamin wasfascinated by the Aztecs and recorded two dreams about them in One-Way Street: inone, he sees a Mexican shr ine from the t ime of pre-animism, from theAnaquivitlzi,10 and in the other he encounters a priest rais[ing] a Mexicanfetish.11 In 1918, Eduard Stucken (an author Freud had in his library) publishedDie weissen Gtter, a novel about the conquest of Mexico, with the white godsdenot ing the Spanish conquistadors.12 Two years later, in 1920, GerhartHauptmann wrote a play based on Stuckens novel: Der weisse Heiland (The whitesavior) was staged, with much fanfare, throughout Germany and Austria. One ofthe productions featured a replica of Moctezumas headdresss held in the collec-tions of the Museum of Natural History. Even Oswald Spengler succumbed to thelure of the Aztecs: his archive at the Munich State Library includes an unpub-lished play titled Montezuma: ein Trauerspiel.13

The Aztec-mania caught on in other European countries. In France,Georges Bataille devoted his 1928 essay Extinct America to analyzing the Aztecssdemented violence, and their pantheon of anthropophagic gods. Bataille paintedthe Aztec rituals as a bloody eccentricity, surely the most extreme ever conceived byan aberrant mind. Continuous crime committed in broad daylight for the mere sat-isfaction of deified nightmares, terrifying phantasms.14

Bataillewho would revisit the theme of Aztec sacrifice in his novels andessays of the 1920s and 30sprovided one of the most original explanations to themystery of how the Spaniards conquered Mexico with only a few hundred men: theAztecs, he argued, chose to die in a massive human sacrifice.15 In 1935, Elias Canettipublished Auto-da-F, which included a nightmare sequence of Aztec human sacrifice:instead of blood, books flow from the victims open chest: Human sacrifices he hadheard of, remarks the character, but books, books!16 Even French cinema partici-pated in this excitement: Jean Renoirs The Rules of the Game (1939) features anelegant woman named Jackie who announces to her aristocratic friends that she hastaken up the study of pre-Columbian art only to be derided as an intellectual fashionvictim by the other guests.

As these examples reveal, the Aztecs were very much la mode among

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10. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. EdmundJephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 60. On Benjamins Mexican studies,see John Kraniauskas, Beware Mexican Ruins!: One-Way Street and the Colonial Unconscious, inWalter Benjamins Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne(London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13954. 11. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 51. 12. Though Freud did not own a copy of Die weissen Gtter, his library includes another text byStucken: (Leipzig: Eduard Pfeiffer, 1907). 13. Oswald Spengler, Montezuma: ein Trauerspiel, unpublished manuscript, Oswald SpenglerPapers, Mnchner Staatsbibliothek, Germany. I thank Anke Birkenmeier for this information.14. Georges Bataille, Extinct America, trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (Spring 1986), pp.39. For the French see LAmrique disparue, Cahiers de la Rpublique des Lettres, des Sciences et des Arts(1928), p. 5. 15. Ibid. 16. Elias Canetti, Auto-da-F (1935; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 40.

European intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps the horrors experienced byEurope during World War I had made the theme of human sacrifice particularlyrelevant to intellectuals. Alas, none of these Aztec-philic authors are representedin Freuds library. But the library does include three books that include lengthydiscussions of Ancient Mexico: Sir James George Frazers The Golden Bough,Heinrich Heines Romanzero, and, to a lesser extent, Robertson Smiths Lectures onthe Religions of the Semites.17 These are authors Freud knew wellFrazer and Smithare the main sources for Totem and Taboo, and Heine is cited frequently in Jokesand Their Relation to the Unconsciousand their views on Aztec culture would haveinfluenced Freuds ideas about Mexico . . . and about the pre-Columbian objects inhis collection.

Frazers Mexico

The eleven volumes of Frazers The Golden Bough constitute the most ambi-t ious, encyclopedic, and controversial collect ion of worldwide myths everpublished. Pre-Columbian Mexico is an important reference throughout this mon-umental study: Frazer writes at length about the Aztecs and, to a lesser degree,about other Indian groups in Mexico.

Frazer was especially interested in the Aztec practice of ritual sacrificeatopic he explores in depth in two chapters of The Golden Bough: Eating the Godamong the Aztecs (in the volume Spirits of the Corn and the Wild ) and Killing theGod in Mexico (a section of The Scapegoat ). Frazer was both fascinated and horri-fied by this ritual, which he called the most monstrous on record.18 He notedthat in pre-Columbian Mexico more people used to be sacrificed on the altarthan died a natural death.19

The first of these chapters, Eating the God in Mexico, analyzes the cus-tom of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god as part of a widerdiscussion about spirits of the corn and the wild. Frazer describes the ritual ofsolemnly ingesting an edible image of Huitzilopochtli or Vitzliputzli. Priestsmade a likeness of the god out of maize and honey paste, carried it to the top of apyramid, and then fed it to the worshippers

in [the] manner of a communion, beginning with the greater, and con-tinuing unto the rest, both men, women, and little children, whoreceived it with such tears, fear, and reverence as it was an admirablething, saying that they did eat the flesh and bones of God, wherewiththey grieved.20

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17. Robertson Smith only mentioned the Aztecs in a footnote, quoted by both Frazer and Freud.See Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: Adam and Charles, 1896), p. 295 fn. 2. 18. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan and Co,191115), VI, p. 315.19. Frazer, The Golden Bough, IX, p. 297.20. Frazer, The Golden Bough, VIII, p. 88.

Frazer comments that from this interesting passage we learn that the ancientMexicans, even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, were fully acquaintedwith the theological doctrine of transubstantiation and acted upon it in thesolemn rites of their religion.21 Freud seemed especially interested in this idea:he marked the passage on the doctrine of transubstantiation or the magical con-version of bread into flesh recognized by the ancient Aztecs and Brahmansoneof only two pages annotated by Freud in The Golden Bough.22

Frazer theorized that the practice of ingesting a divine likeness was closelyrelated to human sacrifice. The Mexicans, he wrote, did not always contentthemselves with eating their gods in the outward and visible shape of bread orgrain, even in cases when the dough was kneaded and fortified with humanblood. But the people aspired for a closer union with the living god, andattained it by devouring the flesh of a real man, who, after he had paraded for atime in the trappings and received the honors of a god, was slaughtered and eatenby his cannibal worshippers. Once dead, instead of being kicked down the stair-case and sent rolling from step to step like the corpses of common victims, thebody of the dead god was carried respectfully down, and his flesh, chopped upsmall, was distributed among the priests and nobles as a blessed food.23 Frazersaw these ceremonies as exemplifying the custom of entering into communionwith a god by eating his effigy.24 He believed that the intention of these ritualswas two-fold: to keep the corn spirits alive and to allow the worshippers to par-takeby eating a likenessin a portion of the gods divinity.25

Frazer merely touched on sacrificial rituals in Spirits of the Corn and the Wild,but he presented a more elaborate discussion in The Scapegoat, a volume thatdevotes an entire chapter to the practice of killing the god in Mexico. Amongno other people, he writes, does the custom of sacrificing the human represen-tative of a god appear to have been observed so commonly and with so muchsolemnity as by the Aztecs of Mexico.26

Frazer found these sacrificial rituals shocking, but he was even more dis-turbed by another Aztec practice: cannibalism. He describes, in gruesome detail,the anthropophagic rituals involving prisoners captured in warfare.27

Frazer concludes that the sacrifice of these human deities constituted ameans of perpetuating the divine energies in the fullness of youthful vigour,untainted by the weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have sufferedif the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.28 Through these rituals, thepriests attempted not merely to revive the gods whom they had just slain in the

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21. Frazer, The Golden Bough, VIII, Spirits of the Corn and the Wild, II, pp. 8690. 22. Ibid., p. 89. Freuds copy of The Golden Bough is kept at the Freud Museum London. 23. Ibid., p. 92. 24. Ibid., p. 93. 25. Ibid., pp. 1389. 26. Frazer, The Golden Bough, IX, p. 257. 27. Ibid., p. 283. 28. Ibid., p. 296.

persons of their human representatives, but also to restore to their wasting anddecaying frames all the vigour and energy of youth.29

Frazers analysis of Aztec religion emphasized two themes that were offundamental importance in Freuds work: human sacrifice and cannibalism. Totemand Taboo, the only work in which Freud refers to ancient Mexico, notes that thehuman sacrifices of the Aztecs [which] have been reported in detail by Frazer inthe fifth part of his great work, constitute a good example of the sacramentalnature of sacrificial rituals.30 Like the English anthropologist, Freud associatedpre-Columbian Mexico with the bloody rituals of killing and eating sacrificial vic-tims. But as we will see further on, his reaction to these practices was quitedifferent than Frazers.

Heines Mexico

In addition to The Golden Bough, Freud owned another book that dwelt atlength on Aztec rituals: Heinrich Heines Romanzero (1851), a collection thatincluded Vitzliputzli, a mock-epic about the conquest of Mexico. This mischie-vous poem, written in the 1840s while Heine was exiled in Paris, could not bemore different in tone and spirit from Frazers anthropological texts.

Vitzliputzli recasts the story of the conquest of Mexico as a German Romantictale. The poem opens with a prelude hailing America as a bright new land thatshines with sea-fresh colors and drips with pearls or water, in contrast to an oldEurope that has degenerated into a romantics graveyard and an ancient junk-yard.31 The action begins with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexicoand their first encounter with the Aztecs. Heine does not show much sympathy forthe Spanish leader, Hernn Corts, whom he calls a bandit and a robber cap-tain.32 In contrast, Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, appears as a gracious host,showering the foreigners with gifts, only to be kidnapped and murdered by them.His death ignites a violent war, and the Mexicans turn all their rage against the con-quistadors: a stormy tide of terror/mounted like a savage ocean.33

The first sect ion of the poem closes with the Spaniards, beaten anddemoralized, retreating from the Aztec city. Heine paints this scene with all thepathos characteristic of Romantic poetry: Blood flowed red in streaming tor-rents/And the bold carousers struggled.34 Even the mighty Corts breaksdown at the sight of the carnage, and we find him weepy, under weeping wil-lows.35 While the Spaniards mourn, the Aztecs prepare to celebrate their

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29. Ibid., pp. 3045. 30. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 139. 31. Heinrich Heine, Vitzliputlzi, in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern EnglishVersion, ed. and trans. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), p. 599.32. Ibid., p. 602. 33. Ibid., p. 603. 34. Ibid., p. 605. 35. Ibid., p. 608.

victory by offering a sacrifice to the god Vitzliputzli. The ceremony, like thosedescribed by Frazer in The Golden Bough, takes place on a pyramid. At the summitof this Red-br ick stronghold of the idol/Strange reminder ofEgyptian/Babylonic and Assyrian/Buildings, monstrous and colossal,36 we catchthe first glimpse of the bloodthirsty god Vitzliputztli:

There, upon his altar-throneseatSits the mighty Vitzliputlzi,Mexicos bloodthirsty war god.Hes an evil looking monster,

But so droll is his exterior,So bedizened and so childish,That in spite of inward shuddersYet he tickles us to laughter.37

After a sacrificial banquet, Viztliputzlis mood turns somber: he predicts animminent Spanish victory followed by the destruction of his city, the collapse ofAztec civilization, and the twilight of its gods: Smashed to bits will be my temple,he laments, I myself will fall and founder/In the ruinsdust and ashes. ButVitzliputzli is a god, and since gods are immortal, he will survive the mayhem: fol-lowing the destruction of the Aztec city, Vitzliputzli will flee his homeland and seekrefuge in Europe, the land of his enemies, where he will devote his endless life toterrorizing his foes with torments/Frighten them with ghostly phantoms.38

Heines portrayal of Ancient Mexico foregrounds the same two themesFrazer presented in The Golden Bough: cannibalism and human sacrifice. IndeedVitzliputzli focuses on the same rituals discussed in Frazers study, and the twoauthors consulted the same sources on Aztec religious ceremonies.39 Heinesdescriptions of Aztec priests offering the aroma of human blood to their deitieswhile feasting on the flesh of eighty Spaniards would be entirely at home in thecatalogue of pre-Columbian atrocities compiled by Frazer.

But Heines attitude towards ancient Mexico could not be more differentfrom Frazers. From the very first lines of the poem, Heine makes it clear thathis sympathies lie with the Aztecs and not with the Europeans: America is a new,fresh land, bursting with colors, smells, and other sensations, while Europe hasbecome an ancient junkyard.40 Corts is a bandit; the Aztecs, gracious hostsand courageous fighters.41

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36. Ibid., p. 607. 37. Ibid.38. Ibid., pp. 61314.39. On Heines sources, see Vitzliputzli, in Studien zu Heines Romanzero, ed. Helene Herrmann(Berlin: Weidmannische Buchhandlung, 1906), pp. 1241.40. Heine, Vitzliputlzi, in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine, p. 599.41. Ibid., p. 605.

And if Frazer deplored the Aztec sacrificial rituals as the most monstrous onrecord, Heine likens them to Spanish customs and draws a parallel between com-munion and sacrificial slaying.42 Heines Aztec priest offers an even moreheretical comparison of Christian and Mexican sacrificial rituals. He calls theSpaniards morally ugly and views their religion with contempt. Theyre evenwont to/munch upon their own gods bodies, he exclaims in disgust, dismissingthe foreigners as god-devourers.43

In the end, Heines Vitzliputzli subverts the opposition between savage andcivilizedan opposition that structures most European accounts of Aztec civilization,including The Golden Bough. Though Heine introduces the Aztecs as savage, he ulti-mately presents them as more civilized than the Spaniards: it is the SpanishChristians who backstab, rob, steal, and ultimately adopt a watered-down version ofhuman sacrifice because they cannot stomach the real thing, while the Aztecs arenoble, courageous, and in touch with the true nature of sacrificial rituals.44

Heine turns the Aztec priest into a Romantic hero and human sacrifice intoa poetic model. His Aztecs are not only civilized, but their rituals surpass those ofthe Spaniards in theological complexity: Mexican sacrifice is authentic, unlike thepale simulacrum practiced by the Christians. Frazer imagined himself as a poten-tial victim of Aztec sacrifice, while Heine identified with Vitzliputzli: like theMexican god, he was an exile condemned to live far away from his native land andlament its fate.

When Freud read Heines Romanzero, he would have been particularly atten-t ive to the ending: Vitzliputzli, like libidinal flows, is never destroyed. Hedisappears from one location to reappear in anotherthe same procedure Freudattributed to psychic forces. In The Uncanny, Freud invoked another one ofHeines poems to explain the workings of unconscious repression: in uncannyexperiences, he wrote, the double has become a thing of terror, just as, after thecollapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.45 The analyst was refer-r ing to Heines Die Gtter im Exil, a poem devoted to the same topic asVitzliputzli: the exile of deities after the collapse of their cultures. Among somany other things, Vitzliputzli is a parable about the return of the repressed.

Mexican Taboos

The Golden Bough and Romanzero present two very different models for thinkingabout the pre-Columbian objects in Freuds collection of antiquities. Frazers accountwould have led Freud to perceive the ancient Mexicans as a barbarous and blood-thirsty bunch, given to the most extravagant acts of crueltyrituals that would send

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42. Heine, Complete Poems, p. 609. 43. Ibid, p. 612. 44. Hal Draper renders bei den Wilden as savage Indians, but this translation introduces thenegative connotations of savagery.45. Freud, The Uncanny, vol. 17 The Standard Edition, p. 236.

shivers up the spine of even the most sadistic of his patients. Heines poetry, on theother hand, would have inspired him to imagine the Aztecs as Romantic heroes, aspassionate warriors whose practice of human sacrifice was merely a more honest ver-sion of the Christian sacrament of communion.

Unlike Frazer, Freud was not easily shocked by either human sacrifice or canni-balism. He spent many years thinking about the role of these two practices in theevolution of civilization, and he wrote at length about them in Totem and Tabooawork that is both an elaboration of and a response to Frazers The Golden Bough.

Human sacrifice and cannibalism play a crucial role in the tale of a primevalparricide told in Totem and Taboo. But for Freud, human sacrificethe killing ofthe father by the primal horderepresents the cornerstone of civilization. Allreligious and social innovations since then, Freud argues, have been attempts toatone for the brothers deed: first came totemic religion (with its two taboosdesigned to prevent further killings), followed by the invention of the concept ofgod (at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father46), which eventuallyled to the generalized practice of sacrifice (The object of an act of sacrifice hasalways been the samenamely, what is now worshipped as God, that is to say, thefather47), before culminating with the appearance of kings (father surro-gates48). Even the rise of Christianity was merely a sophisticated variation on theprimitive crime: In the Christian doctrine . . . men were acknowledging in themost undisguised manner the guilty primeval deed, since they found the fullestatonement for it [the murder of the father] in the sacrifice of his son.49

Freud is especially interested in the emergence of sacrifice as an integral ele-ment of religious practice. At its origin, he writes, it was offered directly toGoda paternal substituteas a way of atoning for the killing: The importancewhich is everywhere, without exception, ascribed to sacrifice lies in the fact that itoffers satisfaction to the father for the outrage inflicted on him.50 But sacrifice,which always involves the slaying of animals or humans, is also a symbolic repeti-tion of the primitive murderthe worshippers direct their murderous impulsesagainst a paternal substitute taking the form of an animal or human. Sacrifice is asymbolically ambivalent deed: it is meant to atone for the patricide through an actthat is also its symbolic repetition, or, as Freud puts it, sacrifice offers satisfactionto the father for the outrage inflicted on him in the same act in which that deed iscommemorated.51

Totem and Taboo links human sacrifice to cannibalism, one of the practicesboth Frazer and Heine associated with Mexico. The horde of brothers, Freudexplains, went from crime to anthropophagic feast: Cannibal savages as they

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46. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 147.47. Ibid., p. 151. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 154. 50. Ibid., p. 151. 51. Ibid.

were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killinghim.52 But if the murder was sparked by an irruption of hostile impulses, the actof cannibalism stemmed from more complex feelings: The violent primal fatherhad doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company ofbrothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identificationwith him, and each of them acquired a portion of his strength.53

Cannibalism is the cornerstone of identification, a fundamental psychoana-lytic concept. The father might have been a ruthless tyrant, but there were manyaspects of him that the brothers admired: his strength, his power, his sex appeal.After his death, the brothers yearned to become like himor at least like the por-tion of his personality they respected and admired. And since they had no morecomplex mechanisms at their disposal, they decided to eat him: by incorporating aportion of the dead body, each of them would be able to carry with him a piecea good pieceof the father. If the brothers killed their father out of hatred, theyate him out of love. Or, to put it in slightly different terms, Freud considered can-nibalism a primitiveperhaps the most primitiveexpression of love.

Like sacrifice, this primitive act of cannibalism underwent a series of trans-formations through the ages: it was first commemorated by the totem meal, inwhich a father substitute, the totem animal, was eaten by the group; with time theritual became more abstract, until the advent of Christianity, a religion in whichthe ancient totem meal was revived in the form of communion, in which the com-pany of brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the sonno longer thefatherobtained sanctity thereby and identified themselves with him.54 Freudstresses that Christianity, the religion of civilized Europe, features as its mostimportant sacrament a symbolic repetition of the cannibalistic feast celebrated bythe primal horde.55 Freuds argument turned his readersat least the Christiansamong theminto cannibals of sorts who continued to symbolically eat the fleshof a paternal figure even while condemning, like Frazer, the anthropophagic ritu-als practiced by primitive peoples.

We can thus see how greatly Freuds views on human sacrifice and cannibalismdiffered from those expressed by Frazer and Heine. Unlike Frazer, Freud did notbelieve that these practices were the exclusive domain of savages living in far-awaylands. If Frazer established a rigid distinction between civilization and barbarism,between rational Europeans and cannibalistic Indians, Freud insisted on the continu-ity of these violent impulses from the primal horde to the present, emphasizing howthe most refined accomplishments of civilizationincluding the institutions of reli-gion and the laware built on a foundation of anthropophagic sacrifice.

Freud is closer in spirit to Heine. The poets comparison of Christian com-munion and Mexican theanthropic sacrifice fits within the elegant scheme

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52. Ibid., p. 142. 53. Ibid. 54. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 154.55. Ibid.

presented in Totem and Taboo. But there is an important difference between theanalyst and the poet: while Heine falls under the sway of the Romantic myth ofthe noble savage and renders his Aztecs more authentic and more passionate thantheir Spanish counterparts, Freud refuses to idealize either savages . . . or his con-temporaries. Our civilization might have developed institutions to keep violentimpulses at bay, but at bottom, modern man differs very little from the murder-ous horde of brothers. Freud believes that the impulse to kill and eat the fatherhas not been extinguished; it has merely undergone a series of transformationsand developments through the ages. And, as he would later argue in Civilizationand Its Discontents, our supposedly civilized world is ever on the brink of slidingback into barbarism.

While most European intellectuals in the early twentieth century saw theAztecs as cruel practitioners of human sacrifice and cannibalism, Freud wouldhave considered them simply as a people who openly displayed the hostileimpulses that are part and parcel of human nature. He actually places the Aztecswithin the historical overview presented in Totem and Taboo : more advanced thanthe primal hordethey had developed a sophisticated religion, solid social insti-tutions, and had moved beyond the totem meal and animal sacrificesthe Aztecswere still practicing the kind of theanthropic sacrifices cataloged by Frazer.Unlike the Spaniards, they had not yet elevated sacrificial cannibalism into a sym-bolic ritual, and thus they remained bound to a recurring, literal repetition of theprimeval killing of the father. We can trace through the ages, writes Freud, theidentity of the totem meal with animal sacrifice, with theanthropic human sacri-fice, and with the Christian Eucharist, and we can recognize in all these rituals theeffect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed down but of which theymust none the less feel so proud.56

Freud does not comment on the horror experienced by the Spaniards at thediscovery of Aztec religion, but he would have perhaps interpreted it as a classicexample of the uncanny: an overwhelming sense of anxiety experienced at the sightof an act repressed from conscious memory. What had been repressed from civilizedEuropethe killing that was the founding act of civilizationreturned with shock-ing literalism in Aztec sacrifice: what the Spaniards repeated metaphorically in theritual of the Eucharist, the Aztecs commemorated literally, by selecting a father fig-ure to sacrifice and devour. The anxiety produced by this dj vu would explain theviolence with which Europeans reacted to Aztec sacrificial ceremonies.

Totem, Taboo, and Multiculturalism

One remarkable feature of the historical account presented in Totem and Taboois its capacity to accommodate every culture and religious system, from animism toJudaism and from Aboriginal totemism to Christianity. Freuds schema can account

Freuds Mexican Antiquities 83

56. Ibid.

for Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and evenpre-Columbian belief systems. In his con-ception, all of these religions worship agod that functions as a father substituteand stage rituals that are symbolic repeti-tions of the primal killing.

Like The Golden Bough , Totem andTaboo aspires to universality. But if Frazerproceeds like an encyclopedist, catalogu-ing the worlds myriad myths and rituals,Freud acts as a theorist, devising a singleschema to account for the totality of reli-gious beliefs. Frazer assumes a completediscontinuity between European civiliza-t ion and savage peoples; Freud, on theother hand, focuses on the shared psychictraits linking civilization and barbarism, European and non-European peoples.

The approaches taken by Freud and Frazer correspond to the differencesbetween their disciplines: anthropology highlights cultural differences, while psy-choanalysis treats national and ethnic differences, like religion, as mere illusions.Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the universality of unconscious structurescomplexes, anxieties, fears, desiresand the shared psychic traits among peopleof different cultures. Totem and Taboo, for instance, insists on the Oedipus complexas a fundamental structure of the human psyche, found alike in Aborigines, pre-Columbians, and Europeans. Cultures and religions might undergo radicaltransformations across time and space, but the essential component of theOedipus complex remains constant.

The schema presented in Totem and Taboo can be applied to the belief sys-tems of ancient Peru, contemporary Africa, or medieval Spain. In this sense,Freud was a multiculturalist avant la lettre : Rather than stressing national speci-ficities, as many of his contemporaries did, Freud emphasizes the common traitslinking peoples and cultures across geographical, linguistic, religious, and politi-cal borders. In his view, the unconsciousas well as the structures of the psychicapparatusare universal attributes of humankind, and no one culture can layclaim to them.

In Freud and the Non-European, a brilliant little book, Edward Said positsFreuds Moses and Monotheism as a model for thinking about national and ethnicidentity. Said notes that Freuds inquiry into the origins of Judaism opens with ashocking hypothesis: Moses was an Egyptian, and thus the founder of the Jewishreligion was a non-Jew. Formulated in slightly different terms, Freuds inquiryinto the identity of his people places the Other at its center. And if the foundingfather of Judaism is not Jewish, then Jewish identity is predicated on alterity. In

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Max Pollack. Freudat His Desk. 1913.

excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Said writes, Freud insisted that itdid not begin with it self, but rather with other ident it ies (Egypt ian andArabian).57 This analysis mobilized the non-European past in order to under-mine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on asound foundational basis, whether religious or secular.58 And it is precisely thisconstruction of identity as a dialectical oscillation between self and Other thatFreuds museography sets into motion.

What I have called Freuds multicultural viewand what Said sees as anopen theory of identityis best illustrated by the arrangement of antiquities onhis desk. Out of the hundreds of pieces he owned, Freud selected a handful ofprized objects for this privileged spot: these were his most treasured pieces, thegods who kept him company as he wrote in his study. As Freud worked onTotem and Taboo between 1912 and 1913, his eyes would have wandered from thepaper to the antiquities on his desk, and the figurines accompanied him as hemeditated on primal hordes, human sacrifices, and cannibalistic feasts.

Examining the antiquities on Freuds desk, as captured in an etching by MaxPollak from 1914, the viewer is struck by their diversity: there are Egyptian, Umbrian,Greek, and Roman figures. By 1938, when Edmund Engelman photographed theinterior of Berggasse 19, just before Freud left Vienna, the collection on the desk hadgrown to encompass Chinese, Mesopotamian, as well as more Roman and Egyptianpieces.59 In addition, the vitrines in his study and consulting room held other objectsfrom Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. Freuds private pantheon was truly mul-ticultural: a veritable sampling of civilizations ranging from Southern Europe to theFar East, and from the Americas to Oceania.

Freuds collecting was characterized by a Franciscanism of culturesto para-phrase Roland Barthes assessment of Severo Sarduys narrative technique.60 Heopened the door of Berggasse 19 to representatives from every imaginable ancientcivilization, Eastern and Western, Southern and Northern. And all pieces sharedthe same space: Freud refused to segregate them according to national or geo-graphic origin, or even to submit them to the logic of chronological ordering. Hisdesk and vitrines became egalitarian territories in which Greek and Roman antiq-uitieslongstanding symbols of European high culturerubbed shoulders withNorth-African and Asian figures.

Freuds egalitarian museography is all the more striking if we consider that inthe early decades of the twentieth centurythe period in which Freud devoted themost energy to his collectionmost museums moved in the opposite direction, carv-ing out separate spaces for European and non-European antiquities. In Freuds

Freuds Mexican Antiquities 85

57. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 44. 58. Ibid., p. 45.59. For a full image of the antiquities on Freuds desk, see Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19:Sigmund Freuds Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 64, plate 25. 60. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

Vienna, Franz Josef inaugurated two grand institutions structured by this culturaldivide: the Art History and the Natural History museums, built on opposite sides ofa plaza on the Ringstrasse and opened with great fanfare in 1891 and 1889, respec-t ively. The citys cultural officials exhibited Greek, Roman, and Egyptianantiquities at the Museum of Art History, presenting these ancient cultures asprecursors to the Italian Renaissance and Austrian baroque paintings housedunder the same roof; Mexican, Peruvian, and Asian objects, on the other hand,were sent across the street, where they shared gallery space with mineral collec-tions, prehistoric fossils, the Emperors meteorite samples, and other productsof natural history. The cultural divide separating European and non-Europeanantiquities became even more pronounced in 1928, when the city inauguratedthe Museum of Ethnography, in the Hofburg, the Palace on the Ringstrasse thatlost its imperial tenants after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in1918. This new museum becameand continues to bethe repository of thenations Asian, pre-Columbian, and African collections.

Like Totem and Taboo, Civilizat ion and its Discontents, and Moses andMonotheism, Freuds museography is an experiment in applied psychoanalysis.Freud treats antiquities as universal products of the psyche, as evidence thatChinese and Egyptians, Greeks and Africans shared the same complexes andfantasies. Like the unconscious, the antiquities grouped in Freuds collectionexist in a realm that is timeless: 4,000-year-old Egyptian masks sit next to Greekvases from the fifth century BCE and Mexican pieces from the pre-Columbianeraas if the same creative drive had remained constant through the ages.Freuds egalitarian arrangement seems to stress that the antiquities ultimatelycame from the same place: from the unconscious creative processes of artisansand artists. If Freud had opened a museum in Vienna, it would have been nei-ther art-histor ical, nor ethnographic: it would have been a Museum desUnbewussten, a Museum of the Unconscious.

Freud Amid Moctezumas Treasures

In addition to his readings, Freud would have come into contact with animportant collection of Mexican antiquities during his frequent visits to theViennese museums of Art History and Natural History, where he often met JuliusBanko, director of the antiquities collection and an expert who authenticatedsome of his purchases.61

Banko worked at the Museum of Art History. Across the street , theMuseum of Natural History held one of Europes most important collections ofMexican antiquities, including several Aztec pieces sent to Europe during thefirst days of the conquest. This collection has an unusual and fascinating history

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61. Lynn Gamwell, The Origins of Freuds Antiquities Collection, Sigmund Freud and Art: HisPersonal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 24.

worth retelling. The Museum of Natural History (designed by Carl Hasenauerand founded in the 1870s) started with a small but valuable collection thatincluded an Aztec headdress and other rare examples of Mexican feather artthat had been sent to Europe shortly after the conquest. The first director,Ferdinand von Hochstetter (18291884), spent the first years of his tenureenlarging the collection and purchasing important holdings of Mexican art scat-tered throughout the Austro -Hungarian Empire. In only a few years, heacquired some of the Empires most important American objects, including theAmbras Collectionassembled by Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol in the late six-teenth centuryas well as the collection amassed by Maximilian von Hapsburgduring his years in Mexico.

By the time the Museum of Natural History opened to the public, its hold-ings had grown exponentially to include hundreds of Mexican objects: Aztecfeatherwork, stone sculptures from Central Mexico, slate artifacts from Mezcala,and even various codices. The Mexican collection was among the most impor-tant in Europe, and it also attested to the close historical ties that had boundAustria and Mexico since the sixteenth century: at the time of the conquest,Spain was ruled by a Hapsburg, Charles V, an heir to the dynasty that to this daySpanish speakers call la casa de los Austrias. During the rule of this Austrianmonarch, hundreds of treasures were shipped from the Americas to Europe;Charles V distributed them among relatives and friends, and many of the pieceseventually wound up in Austria.

The treasures sent to Charles V from the Americas included the set ofobjects known as Moctezumas presents. In 1519, when Corts and his men dis-embarked on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma sent anenvoy to present the newcomers with a treasure trove of gifts. Corts accepted

Freuds Mexican Antiquities 87

Edmund Engelman.The ConsultingRoom, Berggasse19. 1938.

the goods, catalogued them, and sent them to the king. Charles took them toBelgium in 1520, where they were seen by Albrecht Dreran artist Freudadmired and whose engravings decorated his study.62 In his diary, Drer mar-veled at the exotic beauty of these Mexican treasures.63

Moctezumas presents were dispersed in the centuries following the con-quest, but at least twoa mosaic shield and a codexsurfaced in Vienna, wherethey can still be seen today at the Museum of Ethnography and the Prunksaal.64

The historical ties binding Austria to Mexico remained strong. In 1908, anAmerican archaeologist named Zelia Nuttall traveled to Vienna to attend theInternational Congress of Americanists and stunned her audience with a paperarguing that the feather headdress in the Museum of Natural History hadbelonged to the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and was part of the original set ofgifts sent by Corts to Charles V. Even though this hypothesis has since beenproven wrong (the object is indeed from the sixteenth century, but it cannot betraced to Moctezuma), it turned the headdress into one of the museums mainattractions. Freud would have most likely been impressed by the sight of it,made of bright quetzal feathers, and, like most of his contemporaries, he wouldhave believed that it once belonged to Moctezuma, the melancholic ruler whomet such a tragic fate and had inspired a long tradition of European iconogra-phy depicting him as a majestic hero in all his glory. Some scholars believe thatthe headdress was actually part of a Huitzilopochtli outfit worn by Aztecpriestsa hypothesis that would link the celebrated object to the long traditionof Vitzliputzli imagery represented in Heines poetry and Frazers studies.

But Charles V was not the last Hapsburg with a Mexican connectionorthe last one to send antiquities to Vienna. In 1864, Maximilian, the youngerbrother of Franz Josef, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, accepted anoutlandish offer concocted by Napoleon III as part of his Machiavellian designsto expand the French territories and became Emperor of Mexico. Maximilianwas a collector, and he spent a good deal of his three years in Mexico acquiringhundreds of Aztec and Maya sculptures. Maximilian was so serious about thisproject that he founded an Imperial Museum in Mexico City that was devoted,like its Viennese model, to archaeology and natural history. The Emperorappointed a fellow Austrian, a Cistercian priest named Dominik Bilimek, as itsfirst director.

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62. Freud owned three prints by Drer. One was a present from Emmanuel Lwy. See Gubel,Sphinx de Vienne, p. 20. 63. Albrecht Drer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin: Deutscher Verein frKunstwissenschaft , 1956), p. 155. See also Harold Jantz, Images of America in the GermanRenaissance, First Images of America, vol. 1, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1976), pp. 91105.64. Christian Feest writes: Of a much larger number of Mexican objects whose presence inthe sixteenth and seventeenth century Austrian collections can be documented, only ten are nowpreserved at the Museum fr Vlkerkunde . . . and three at the Museum of Art History in Vienna,Viennas Mexican Treasures, p. 32.

Maximilians reign was short livedhe was executed by firing squad in1867but his collection of Mexican antiquities survived: it was shipped back toAustria and eventually acquired by the Museum of Natural History. Bilimekescaped from the imperial misadventure, and returned to Vienna with an exten-sive collection of his own that he eventually sold to the same museum.

The Museum of Natural History not only housed an important collectionof Mexikanische KostbarkeitenMexican treasures, as they are still knownbut,since so many of its objects were the remnants of Hapsburg imperial ventures, italso doubled as a Museum of Austro-Mexican relations. Walking through theMexican galleries, Freud surely pondered the bloody rituals described by Frazerand Heine for which so many of the objectson display were made to serve; and he musthave meditated on the close ties that boundAustrians of his generation to Mexican sacrifi-cial violence: Maximilians executionone ofthe most traumatic events in nineteenth-cen-tury Austrian historywas perceived by hiscontemporaries as proof that human sacrificeper sisted in Mexico 400 year s after theConquest.

Unlike most of his compatriots, Freudwould have considered the execut ion ofMaximilian not as an outburst of Mexican sav-agery, but as a dramatic illustration of theideas presented in Totem and Taboo. His essayargued that one of the most primitive traits inthe human psyche involved a murderousimpulse against father figuresa primal drivethat had often erupted into actual killings ofkings, rulers, or prophets. Freud analyzedmany instances of these historical murdersthe father of the pr imal horde, Moses,Christand he would have seen Maximiliansexecution as yet another eruption of the Oedipal tensions that were part andparcel of human nature.

As he strolled through Viennas Natural History Museum, Freud wouldhave witnessed the evidence of Austrias long and complicated ties to Mexico: hewould have seen gifts given by Moctezuma to Corts, treasures sent from NewSpain to Charles V, antiquities amassed by Maximilian, and stone sculptures pur-chased by Bilimek for the Imperial Museum. As he contemplated these objects,Freud would have recalled his readings on Mexico: Frazers hair-raising accountsof Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice; Robertson Smiths discussion of

Freuds Mexican Antiquities 89

Nineteenth-century engraving of Moctezuma.

theantropic rituals; and Heines mischievous tale of a defeated Vitzliputzli whodecided to spend the rest of his days tormenting Europeans to avenge thedestruction of Aztec culture.

Upon returning home to Berggasse, Freud would have seen his own collec-tion of antiquities as a miniature version of the imperial museums: his rooms,filled with Greek vases and Roman figurines were a small-scale recreation of theclassical galleries of the Museum of Art History; and his Chinese screens,Japanese figurines, and pre-Columbian objects echoed the much larger hold-ings of the Museum of Natural History. But unlike the museums on theRingstrasse, Freud did not carve out separate spaces for his European and non-European antiquities.

In Freuds home museum, Roman statuettes rubbed shoulders withChinese animals, and Hellenic figurines stood under Egyptian masks. TheMoche vase was stored in the same case as Greek vases, and although we cant becertain of the exact location of the Mexican pieces, we know they were housedunder the same roof as the many other Western and non-Western pieces.

Conclusion

But perhaps Freuds museography, in which Mexican, Egyptian, Greek andRoman antiquities share the same space, calls for a slightly more pessimisticreading. Could not Freuds refusal to allocate separate spaces to the various peo-ples in his collection be read as a denial of cultural difference? Doesnt hisarrangement of object s ignore the deep differences between Greek andChinese, Peruvian and Egyptian cultures, collapsing them all into an overarch-ing concept of the primitive?

Could Freuds museography be interpreted as another instance of the manyefforts by Europeans to deny the importance of American cultures? AfterColumbuss discovery, European intellectuals were baffled by the sudden emer-gence of a new continent inhabited by a people who were radically different fromall existing cultural paradigms. Faced with an enigmatic America, some arguedthat the cultures of the Aztecs and the Inca were not new, but merely variations ofcivilizations that were already known. One of the most famous of these deniers ofAmerican originality was the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. In his OedipusAegyptiacus, Kircher argued that Aztec religion was simply a variant of Egyptianidolatry: like the Egyptians, the Mexicans built pyramids, practiced a polytheisticcult, and worshipped the sun. It seems to surpass all marvels, Kircher concluded,that the Egyptian rites traveled as far as the New World, separated by a nearlyendless interruption of land and sea.65

Others argued that Mexico was settled by the lost tribes of Israel, or byPhoenicians or Carthaginians. All of these hypotheses had one element in com-

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65. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (165254), p. 417.

mon: they denied the cultural originality of American civilizations by assimilatingthem into cultural models that were already known to the Europeans. As OctavioPaz has written, It would not be an exaggeration to conclude that the discoveryof America was followed by a long period of covering-up [encubrimiento]. We hadto wait until the end of the eighteenth century for the beginning of the slow dis-covery of American civilizationsa process that has not yet concluded. . . . Toaccept the originality of the two great American civilizationsAndean andMesoamericanwas and still is difficult.66

Did Freuds museography, like Kirchers Oedipus Aegyptiacus, amount to adenial of the originality of American civilizations? Did the placement of Mexicanand Peruvian antiquities in a room filled with Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiq-uities serve to flatten out the differences among the people who created theseobjects? Did Freud, like Kircher, believe that the Aztecs and the Incas were ulti-mately indistinguishable from the Egyptians? Would Paz have criticized Freudsdisplay of Mexican and Peruvian pieces as yet another example of the covering-up of American cultures?

Kircher and his followers gave primacy of place to European civilizationand considered all other culturesfrom China to Mexicoas derivative, butFreud had a different set of values. If we look at Freuds desk as the centralexhibition space of his museum, we discover that Europe does not have amonopoly over the center: Greek and Roman figurines, longstanding symbolsof European civilization, share center stage with Chinese jades and even a new-world porcupine cast in bronzea souvenir from Freuds only visit to Americain 1909.67

Freud placed objects from non-European civilizations at the center of hismuseum, refusing to establish a hierarchy between European and non-Europeancultures. Unlike ethnocentric critics, he did not see distant civilizations as merecopies of a superior European model; and unlike Europhobic thinkers, he did notmerely invert the equation to make Europes Others into noble savages. Freudsmuseum refuses all hierarchies and places European and non-European cultureson the same plane . . . and on the same desk.

Earlier I discussed Edward Saids claim that by making Moses into a non-Jew, Moses and Monotheism placed alterity at the center of Freuds construction ofJudaism as a polyvalent identity. Freud reached a similar conclusion through theexcavation of the archaeological past represented by his collection of antiqui-ties: digging further and further into the origins of civilization, he discoveredthat the earliest artistic representations sprung, simultaneously, in Europe,Egypt, China, Japan, Mexico, and Peru. There is not a single one of these cul-tures that trumps the other, not one that can claim primacy over the rest.

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66. Octavio Paz, Los privilegios de la vista, Obras completas, VII (Mexico City: Fondo de CulturaEconmica, 1994), p. 28. 67. On Freuds American porcupine see George Prochnik, The Porcupine Illusion, Cabinet 26(Summer 2007), pp. 2327.

European and non-European civilizations coexist in Freuds museum as differ-ent manifestations of the same universal human drive to make art.

Freud could have taken Rimbauds famous utteranceJe est un autreasthe motto for his museum of antiquities, but he might have added that jethe Iof every speaking subjectis not only an other but is also unconscious. Or rather,as Said suggested, identitywhether European or non-Europeanis built on thedouble pillars of the unconscious and alterity: Je suis inconscient and Linconscientest un autrean otherness that Freud highlighted in his collecting practice.

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