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Editor's Note: The following essay was accepted for publication as the special issue on “Freud's Archeology” was being prepared. Although not part of the original plan, it is thematically related to the others. Maya Balakirsky Katz shows how Freud used his “master metaphor” to send a message about his rivals and followers.
This paper seeks to elucidate Freud's untitled 1911 essay on the then-recent archeological discoveries in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus (Appendix). Scholars generally agree that the content of Freud's concise four paragraphs concerns a report on the archeological record of the transformations of the cult of the ancient mother goddess from her Asiatic origins “possibly under the name of Oupis” to her historical modifications into Artemis, Diana, and the Christian Madonna under the influence of various invaders, proselytizers, and protestors (Freud 1911b, p. 158). Freud trusted his readers to solve the essay's central riddle when it appeared in the journal Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse; Medizinsische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (Central Sheet for Psychoanalysis; Medical Monthly for Psychology). If anyone wondered why Freud published what today reads as a dry archaeological summary, it warranted no published commentary at the time of its initial circulation—presumably because its meaning was transparent at the time. The leading Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, for example, exchanged references to key details in the essay in his private correspondence with Freud (Freud & Ferenczi, 1996, pp. 459-460; 2000, pp. 381-382) and the Viennese psychoanalysts Wilhelm Stekel and Otto Rank published their own clever glosses on Freud's essay that were consistent with the symbol system established in the original text (Stekel, 1912, p. 419; Rank, 1913, pp. 50-60).
Yet, if Freud's original readers found the essay's meaning transparent, we have failed to preserve a clear meaning over