On the Way to the London Mithraeum: Freud's Archaeo-Analysis and the Habsburg Empire's Neo-Roman Mimesis

Preparing the ground for Bloomberg's European headquarters, archaeologists discovered hundreds of ancient writing tablets and iron styluses.1 Originally covered in wax, the tablets preserve the marks left by the stylus and often, “fractured scribblings of earlier missives” lurk under the messages (Pitts, 2019, p. 17). Most of the tablets recorded financial transactions—debts owed, slaves sold. At the inauguration of the London Mithraeum, Michael Bloomberg commented on the fortuitous discovery of this ancient archive on the site now occupied by a company acting as the “global disseminator of business and market data” (Buck, 2017, p. 2). In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud entered his own archaeological dig. Proposing his analogy of human psyche and excavation site, psychoanalytic and archaeological labor, he came across writing tablets, and in his essay on unconscious memory traces, Freud explained the “mystic writing-pad” as a modern form of the ancient wax tablet (1924/1925, p. 229).

Referring to his early texts about forgotten memories and buried scenes, Freud compared himself to Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist, digging excavation trenches.2 Yet Freud explicated many of his key ideas—the unconscious, dream-work, repression—on Roman terrain, from his Virgilian motto in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the book's accumulation of Rome and Hannibal material, to his 1907 reading of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy with its discussions of the human psyche as a Pompeiian