the conscientious archaeologist

8/11/2019 The Conscientious Archaeologist

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The Conscientious Archaeologist

Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, and the Excavation of the Psyche

Alexi Louis Horowitz

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Or so were told in the opening lines of Joan

Didions 1979 essay The White Album. For Didion, storytelling is both the medium through

which individuals construct a notion of the self and the means through which they make sense of

the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience, in order to function in the world.

We frame ourselves, in other words our desires, our fears, our relationshipsin structures

built out of language. We confine the chaos and cacophony of our everyday lives into ordered

sequences through, the imposition, as Didion puts it, of a narrative line upon disparate

images.1Reading the works of Sigmund Freud, one gets the feeling that had he lived to see, or

rather read, the late 1970s, he would probably have agreed with her, at least in part. Freuds

famous couch was, after all, nothing if not a repository of stories.2

Where Freud would almost certainly have differed from Didion is in the importance he

would have placed on the stories we do not tell, the memories we do not acknowledge, the

unexcavated artifacts of the past, and conflicted parts of the self that lie hidden beneath the

apparent coherence of our personalities, our proclamations, and our narratives. For Freud, we

are just as much the things we do not say as those that we do. Despite the fact that towards the

outside the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation, Freud, reminds us that

below the surface lies an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which

it [the ego] serves as a kind of facade.3In opposition to the tidy narrative lines we draw around

our experiences and motivations in our presentation to the outside world, we are, in actuality,roiling crockpots of contradictory desire.

1Joan Didion, The White Album(New York: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979), 5.2Freud did not, of course, restrict his models of the psyche, the id, ego, and super ego to the realm ofexclusively linguistic phenomena.3Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, Norton pbk. ed.. ed.(New York: New York : W.W.Norton, 1995), 724.


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For many individuals, this state of repression or active forgetting, is what allows them to

function in the world; it is business as usual. This is, as Nietzsche expressed it in The Genealogy of

Morals,the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic

order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be nohappiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.4But for those

who have developed neuroseswho have repressed traumatic experiences or forbidden desires so

deeply as to have disrupted the expression of their erotic impulses and manifested

correspondingly painful and debilitating symptoms the stories we tell are, in many respects,

the very structures that hold us back, rigid psychic prisons that restrain us from living full,

healthy, and vital lives. Indeed, Freuds entire aim in developing the psychoanalytic method

seems to have been toward finding a productive means of complicating the stories we tell about

ourselves in order to live. The promise of psychoanalysis comes in offering a means for us to

alienate ourselves from our stories, to allow us to see behind them, to recognize their selective

and fictional aspects, and to unify the disparate selves that reside within us through an

excavation of the psyche and a reinterpretation of the self.

Excavation is an important concept in Freuds work. While he doesnt exactly employ it

as a technical term, his frequent reference to excavation as an analogy for analysis gestures toward

the central position of the archaeological metaphor in the psychoanalytic project. A couple of

pages into his famous late-career essay Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, Freud makes

an important analogy between the city of Rome, and the individual human psyche: "Now let us,

by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a physical entity

with a similarly long and copious pastan entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once

come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to

exist alongside the latest one."5The psyche, Freud suggests, just like the city, is constantly

transforming in time. Psychic structures, like their architectural analogues, are built, some are

destroyed, and others are buried beneath the steady accretion of new experiences and memories.

4Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale,and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Vintage Books ed.. ed., Ecce Homo (New York: New York : VintageBooks, 1989), 58.5Freud, The Freud Reader, 726.


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Just as in the development of the individual, some periods in the citys history are particularly

formative in determining its avenues of future growth. As Freud wrote of the latency period in

Theories of Sexuality: It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the

mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrictits flowdisgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals.6So the

blueprint for the city is constructed, through experiences with objects of desire and impositions

from the external world on the propriety of certain objects over other, differing forces and

constraints interacting and overlapping over time. And so, just as the contemporary ancient city

holds myriad antiquities and remnants of its former developmental manifestations so too does

the individual psyche. As Freud puts it: There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried

in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings.7

Psychoanalysis, in this reading, is the process of excavating the ancient city that is the

psyche, an exploration of the chaotic realm of the unconscious where thoughts live very

comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes8The initial

stages of analysis allow the analysand to externalize their mental cityscape to the visiting

analyst/archaeologist through conversation, of providing the analyst a kind of walking tour of

the psychoscape. The analysts role then, as they figuratively meander the streets of the patients

psyche, is to notice the odd shortcuts, the unexplained rises in topography, to get a sense, in

short, of the hidden histories and obscured structures that lurk beneath its surface by reading the

city as it is presented over the course of many conversations. Remnants of our repressed

experiences remain on the surface of the psychoscape, even when their foundations remain

obscured. This is illustrated in the case of Dora, one of Freuds most famous patients, for

instance, when she displays knowledge of the variety of sexual acts, But the question of where

her knowledge came from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had

forgotten the source of all her information on this subject.9Like the citizens or visitors of a

contemporary city forget the hidden remnants of its past, the individual loses conscious

6Ibid., 261."#$%&'( ")*'8Ibid., 205.9Ibid.


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knowledge of their former selves, of the experiences and desires that have determined the

topography and design of the city that is their psyche. More importantly for the analyst, the

individual forgets the psychic phenomena that then continue to determine and constrain the

flow of libidinal energy within them. These forgotten phenomena are the objects of thepsychoanalysts hunt. As Freud described it to one of his patients: The psychologist, like the

archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patients psyche, before

coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.10The analyst thus sifts, over the course of the

conversations, through the sediment of both the patients stories, and their physical behavior, in

search of repressed memories, trauma, and erotic desires, for the keyso to speakto unlock

the black box of the neurotic psyche.

In Freuds early methodology the information gleaned from this process was used to

aggressively assail the patients modes of interpretation, to deconstruct their narrative

constructions of self and replace them with the analysts own pathologized interpretations. This

technique is most apparent in Freuds Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, the case of

Dora, where every new piece of information unveiled over the course of their conversations,

whether from memories, stories, responses to questions or fragments from dreams, is employed

as ammunition in Freuds efforts to reinterpret Doras desires and memories, each detail

becoming a fact which I [Freud] did not fail to use against her.11But Doras case and her

premature departure from psychoanalytic treatment represented, as Freud made clear in the last

pages of Fragment, a major misstep in his therapeutic technique. By failing to recognize Doras

transferenceher remapping of former displaced desires onto her analyst Freud was unable to

compel Dora to reevaluate her interpretations of her life story, and thereby unable to bring the

repressed memories and desires of her unconscious into the realm of conscious consideration. As

Freud suggests at the end of Fragments, it is only after the transference has been resolved that a

patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been

constructed during the analysis. Only upon the confrontation of their transference will the

patient begin to notice the incompleteness of their interpretations, to recognize the idiosyncrasies

10Stephen Scully, "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch,"Arion5, no. 2 (1997): 25.11Freud, The Freud Reader, 203.


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and incompatibilities that arise within her narrative, and the distorting effects of the repressed

elements of her unconscious.

Jonathan Lear, writing on Doraand the concept of transference in his book Freud,

characterizes Freuds methodological shift following the case as analogous to the differencebetween an archaeological excavation and surface archaeology.12Instead of an active and

penetrating search for repressed psychic material followed by aggressive confrontation with and

deconstruction of the patients interpretations, as Freud practiced with Dora, the analyst comes,

in Freuds later methodological formulation, to assume a more passive role in the process,

inciting the patient to come to their own conclusions and realizations about their own

transferences, and the idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and myopia that characterize their narratives.

As Lear puts it: It will be his non-aggressive, non-erotic openness that will help Dora recognize

the falsity of her experience.13But this reformulation of the psychoanalytic method away from

the more intrusive techniques we might more easily associate with the term excavation is, as

Lear pointed out, still a kind of archaeology of the psyche. The reason it is so is not only because

the analyst still searches for deeply buried artifacts of the patients psychic past. It is also, and

more importantly, because the practice of archaeology is also a kind of narrative construction.

Our conscious notions of self-hood are linked to memories, and ignore unconscious or buried

ones. Our identities are constellations of particular conscious memories and desires into an

interpretive framework. The analyst, like the archaeologist, unearths new evidence and uses it to

complicate our understanding of our selves in the present, to show the incompleteness of our

conscious interpretations, and to thereby offer the newly discovered psychic artifacts for

inclusion into our conscious narratives.

The archaeologist, in other words, does not only dig. The archaeologist is also a builder,

a maker of meaning. The psychoanalyst must remember, then, that both enterprises are

processes of excavation and of interpretation, and take Freuds reminder to heart: like a

conscientious archaeologist, I have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic

12Jonathan Lear, Freud(New York: Routledge, 2005), 135.13Ibid., 142.


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parts end and my constructions begin.14Freud reminds us that the psyche, much like the city, is

not just what it appears to be on the surface, but contains within it the remnants and ripples of

everything it has ever been, everything it has ever experienced. By gently problematizing the

analysands interpretive choices and narrative constructions of identity, by offering them a spacein which to playfully reexamine their memories and desires, they may come to view them as the

contingent, selective, repressive facades they really are, and to expand their confines to include

the deeper, more contradictory inner landscape of desires, fears, and emotions that simmer

always in the deep recesses of our unconscious. As the Wolf-Man, one of Freuds most famous

patients, later wrote of his psychoanalytic treatment: There was always a feeling of sacred peace

and quiet [reminiscent not so much of] a doctors office but rather of an archaeologists study.

Here were all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the laymen recognized as

archaeological finds from ancient Egypt.15Just as the archaeologist seeks the treasures of

antiquity to shed light on how human civilization has developed, and why it is the way it is,

Freud, through his psychoanalytic theory, offers us an insight into the multiplicity of selves that

we have buried within us, and with work, a means of reconciling them. So while he may have

agreed with the observation that we tell stories in order to live, he might have preferred it with

a slight amendment: We deconstruct and reinterpret the stories we tell in order to live, in order

to live more fully.

Works Cited

Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. edited by Peter Gay. Norton pbk. ed.. ed. New York: New York : W.W.

Norton, 1995.

Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo. edited by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, R. J.

Hollingdale and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Vintage Books ed.. ed. New York: New York :

Vintage Books, 1989.

Scully, Stephen. "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch."Arion 5, no. 2 (1997): 222-33.

14Freud, The Freud Reader, 176.15Scully, "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch," 225.

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