Mythological Parallels and Visual Compulsions: The Matriarchal Subtext to Freud's Archaeology

In his 1916 essay “A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession” (“Mythologische Parallele zu einer plastischen Zwangsvorstellung”), Sigmund Freud describes a “more than usually absurd” visual hallucination (Zwangsbild) of one of his patients (1916a, p. 337).1 Every time this young man saw his father enter the room, he would imagine him as a naked lower body with arms and legs, and with a face depicted on the belly. “The placing of the facial features on the abdomen of the caricature struck me at first as very strange,” Freud remarks, until chance led him to an ancient depiction that “tallied exactly” (volle Übereinstimmung) with the obsessive image: Baubo (1916a, pp. 337-338).

At the end of his brief essay, Freud includes a sketch of the ancient artifact in question (Figure 1). It is a statuette of a female figure without a head; her face is instead depicted on her torso so that the vulva seems to merge with the chin dimple. This statuette belongs to a group of Hellenistic (4^th century B.C.) votives that had been discovered at the turn of the century at Priene, on the west coast of modern-day Turkey (Rumscheid, 2006, pp. 220-223). Since their publication in 1904, these statuettes had become known as “Baubo,” identified with a mythical woman by that name, said to have lifted her garment and exposed herself to the goddess Demeter (Wiegand and Schrader, 1904, pp.162-163).