It was Marx's 188th birthday yesterday, as s0metim3s, carlos rojas, and Steven Shaviro, among others, note. I hope to write up something apropos before long.
But it is Freud's today. And old Sigismund would be 150 were he still alive, which is quite a milestone by anybody's standards.
Moreover, I have returned to thinking about ruins, one of Freud's many obsessions. Freud took a keen interest in archaeology, and his home in Hampstead was filled with a collection of over 2,000 curios that had been excavated from the Ancient World: no wonder the London Freud Museum should comment that, surrounded by his antiquities, Freud "worked in a museum of his own creation". (See also The Vienna Freud Museum.)
As the museum further indicates, these curios were prized for more than their aesthetic value alone. Freud believed they told something of the truth of pyschoanalysis and its theories of the unconscious:
One example of this is Freud's explanation to a patient that conscious material "wears away" while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: "I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation."
Freud often compared the unconscious to buried ruins, and the task of the analyst to that of the archaeologist, uncovering ever deeper strata for the prizes hidden in the depths, clues to the ways of life only dimly discerned from mere surface inspection.
But in a late essay, Freud turns this metaphor on its head. In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," ruins stand for what is clearly in view, in front of the analyst's face. And the issue here is why what is so straightforwardly visible, uncompromisingly material, should be strangely denied or disavowed.



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