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In his introductory chapter of his recent companion volume to the “Darwin” exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, curator Niles Eldredge highlights Darwin's continued relevance to the twenty-first century in contrast to the depleted influence of Freud, Marx, and Charles Dickens, the author whose image was replaced by Darwin's on the British ten-pound note in 2000: “with the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the advent of Prozac, society at large seems to have metabolized these two giants [Marx and Freud] to the point where mere mention of their names fails to stir much passion one way or the other.” Darwin, however, “has not been fully absorbed into the mainstream fabric of our collective Western culture” (2005, 7-8).1 While I support Eldredge's goals to convey Darwin's process of discovery and to inform readers and exhibition attendees about the indispensability of evolutionary theory to all the fields of modern biology, I also find it curious that he resorts to the cliché of upholding the importance of Darwin at the expense of Marx, Freud, and even Dickens. We can assimilate Darwin to Western culture, Eldredge implies, only if we disentangle and quarantine his ideas from the psychological, political, and narrative afterlife of the nineteenth century in the traumatic twentieth century.
Richard H. Armstrong's excellent book, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World, not only makes a significant contribution to Freud studies but also offers a corrective to the kind of salvage project in relation to nineteenth-century intellectual culture represented by Eldredge's generalizations. In response to this larger question of how to define the historical sources of our contemporary discussions about science and culture, Armstrong offers a detailed investigation both of psychoanalysis as a form of cultural memory and of our collective associations of Freud with antiquity: “As we move farther and farther away from the twentieth century, the kind of Fre