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Readers of Freud are familiar with his statement that there are striking parallels and analogies between the work of the archeologist and that of the psycho-analyst in uncovering and reconstructing the buried past to show how the present state of affairs arose. But so far as I know nobody has taken this parallel seriously enough to hunt out and consistently examine an instance from archeology to see how far the feeling of its existence is justified and to what extent it depends only on a specious appearance such as might be produced by the paronomastic capacities of our verbal formulas.
One difficulty in tracing out such a parallelism is, of course, the consequence of lack of familiarity that the exploiters of one field of endeavor have with the findings in the other field. Instances suitable for psychoanalytic considerations do not come readily to hand as presented in the writings of the archeologists, who are not interested in the least in presenting their material from this standpoint. If they were to so venture they would expect their amateurish efforts to be met by an attitude of scorn from the experts in the other field.
One would expect to find the best instances for our purpose of comparison in the field of Egyptology, and it so happens that there is at least one instance which seems ideally designed for that purpose. But not only for that purpose. We may use it also as a basis from which to consider another underlying or related feeling which makes us wish to assume certain postulates in theorizing about sociological phenomena and behavior. And so we will extend our investigations of the present instance to have a