Egypt, Greece, and Rome in Freud’s Archaeology – Lecture by Prof. Miriam Leonard

About the lecture
The Freud Museum in London is the final home of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, and his daughter Anna Freud, pioneering child psychoanalyst, who fled to London in 1938 after the Nazi invasion of Vienna. At the heart of the Museum’s display is Sigmund Freud’s personal collection of over 3000 antiquities which were crucially important to the formulation of many of his key ideas such as the Oedipus Complex and the concept of narcissism. Miriam Leonard has curated a number of exhibitions exploring the significance of Freud’s collection to the development of psychoanalysis. This paper will explore how archaeology impacted on Freud’s theories of the mind as well as analysing the extent to which his collection of archaeological objects informed his perspectives on gender, sexuality, race, and the historical construction of personal identity. In particular, it will look at the Egyptian artefacts which form the largest part of Freud’s antiquities collection. Egypt takes on an increasingly prominent role in his work and writings, thanks in no small part to the Egyptological work of his contemporary Flinders Petrie, the Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London. Figures from Egyptian mythology occupy important positions in Freud’s analyses such as in his psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci where the Egyptian goddess Mut turns out to hold the key to the artist’s sexual and creative identity. Egypt also takes centre stage in Freud’s final work Moses and Monotheism, where Freud questions Moses’ Jewish identity and argues that he was an Egyptian. Freud published this work from London where he had been forced into exile after the Nazi annexation of Vienna. The fascination with Egypt thus resonated profoundly with his complex sense of identity and ancestral roots.

About the Speaker
Miriam Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London. Her research explores the intellectual history of classics in modern European thought from the eighteenth century to the present. She is author of Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and (Oxford, 2005), How to Read Ancient Philosophy (London, 2008), Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago, 2012) and Tragic Modernities (Cambridge MA, 2015). She was the curator of the 2019 exhibition ‘Freud and Egypt’, and the 2023 exhibition ‘Freud’s Antiquity’ at the Freud Museum London. Her book ‘Revolution: Modern Uprisings in Ancient Time’ is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.