Powers of Recall: Sigmund Freud's Partiality for the Prehistoric

Sigmund Freud's work continues to attract interest from philosophers, analysts and historians, and the earliest formulation of his theory of the unconscious and the 'seduction hypothesis' have recently received particular attention. While Freud's intellectual debt to such $gures as Darwin, Nietzsche, Helmholtz and Briicke has been well documented, the influence of Heinrich Schliemann on him and his work is little known. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Schliemann's work helped Freud fashion himself as an 'archaeologist of the mind' and how, in the crucial year 1896, it enabled him to construct and present his new ideas. The paper also explores Freud's interest in collecting and suggests how and why Freud's debts to archaeology are not, as commonly thought, visible in the so-called 'archaeological metaphor of mind', but present in other areas of his life and writing.