Sigmund Freud’s Antique Gods

Art should nourish privately, not collectively—and it is one of the most satisfying of the private preoccupations. Thus it comes as no surprise that Sigmund Freud, that unraveller of the subterranean and thwarted instincts of others, should not only choose to keep his collection of some 2500 artefacts quarantined from his family, but furnish posterity with virtually no clues to its allure for him.

That leaves us free to speculate. Why and how did he collect? What was his relationship with his collection? What effect might their proximity have on his musings about humanity at large, which he correctly surmised had not changed its stripes since it first stood upright and played with fire? Did the imperatives and intrigues of the gods and goddesses of antiquity—ultimately given human form by the ancient Greeks and the Romans—help to shape his views of the modern mind? They did.

The pursuit and acquisition of antiquities was a niche activity in Freud’s own time, and still it appears, in ours, where the majority of art collectors want their paintings to be unsoiled, finished and possibly shiny, and their sculpted figures with heads and limbs all present and accounted for.

An exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Museum, called “Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind” was initially guest curated by Dr Janine Burke for the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne last September and was a direct outcome of her most recent book, The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection, itself inspired by her visit to his final home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, in Hampstead, London—now the Freud Museum.

The show, structured around just nineteen artefacts chosen by Burke, arrived at the Nicholson Museum at the beginning of January 2008, where the museum’s Senior Curator, Michael Turner, recreated an environment to approximate Freud’s study and consulting room: colourful Middle Eastern rugs spread over a consulting couch, and a number of artefacts arranged carefully on a generous desk. This comfortable, even welcoming environment was complemented by black-and-white photographs of Freud’s actual study and consulting room in which the busts and bodies of many and various gods and goddesses jostle companionably.

This is a timely reminder that for the thousands of years before Judaism, Christianity and Islam made their appearance, the sandy highways and byways along which innumerable gods had made their intersecting journeys from region to region in the Middle East—always mutating in accordance with the beliefs, prejudices and predilections of a culture—were very busy thoroughfares indeed.

In the world of antiquity, female goddesses were almost as numerous as the males. We have only to consider Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of war and peace, who, as it happens, is in this exhibition; or that mistress of all the elements, sovereign of light and darkness, queen of the dead: Isis. She went by other names as well, according to the region and its culture. In Phrygia she was called Cybele; in Phoenicia, Ashtaroth; in Sicily, Prosperina; and in Crete, Rhea. One doesn’t need to extend this list, but be assured it goes on. Isis, with the infant Horus on her lap, is also in the exhibition.

The progress of gods and goddesses was particularly robust in ancient Greek mythology, where incest multiplied them and makes keeping track of their exploits and achievements quite a task. Prometheus—before he lost his liver to an eagle—is credited with discovering how to make fire, and with inventing pottery and metallurgy. And if that is not enough, he created Pandora, that mischief-maker whose magic box, once opened, created bedlam.

Furthermore, the ancient Greeks and the Romans made certain that no individual god was weighed down with too many responsibilities. Athena was the Goddess of the City (and hopefully a friend to good architects). Zeus had his hands full with thunder, rain and clouds, so Iris looked after the rainbows. Neptune ruled the waves, while Hades busied himself with the underground. The marketplace (that is to say, today’s bourse) was Hermes’ responsibility, and thus he should now be prayed to fervently and often, by the grey suits in glass towers; Asklepios attended to medical needs while the goddess Eileithya kept an eye on childbirth. Pan had his hands full with flocks of sheep, while Aphrodite concerned herself with love and beauty—and so it goes. Very sensible arrangements which may have appealed to Freud’s sense of order.

In many respects, the gods of the ancient world were infinitely more interesting than our contemporary ones. Thus it is not hard to sense their allure for Freud, a committed patriarch who dismissed the gods the modern world offered up, in favour of those more colourful characters with endless and unlimited powers.

Freud’s collection of antiquities from the Middle East, Greece, Rome, Egypt and China leans heavily towards the self-contained stillness of Egyptian statuary, where impassive faces look squarely ahead and two feet are planted for eternity in the next world. It was a supremely assured view of the next world and its complex hierarchies. And in a similar fashion, Freud’s psychoanalytic studies were, in his view, immutable and wholly rational.

Janine Burke suggested to the journalist Joyce Morgan that Freud “may have been attempting to recreate a magical realm of childhood”: “There’s this idea of digging deeply, of getting back to childhood memory … For Freud, childhood was the great template for understanding individual destiny. So he collected from the childhood of civilisation.” But the notion of cultures older than ours being more infantile than our own appears to be curiously short-sighted.