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Upon entering the Freud Museum in London, one is struck by the extensive collection of antiquities (figurines, busts, statues) on display from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and other cultures. Freud was fascinated with ancient civilizations and collected these objects throughout his career; as Harold Blum has noted, the Wolf Man once gave Freud an Egyptian female figure with a miter. Freud believed that bringing pathogenic unconscious mental contents into the light of conscious awareness was a process akin to recovering “buried treasures.” In fact, his office was arranged so that from his chair, positioned at the head of the couch, he could view and contemplate these antiquities during sessions (Lane and Weihs 2010). He believed that unconscious mental contents were a kind of fully formed buried treasure that were kept out of awareness through defensive processes. In many ways, this view of the unconscious lives on today.
This early classical model held (1) that memories and their associated affects are the problem (the source of the symptoms or dysfunction); (2) that the analyst's job is to facilitate overcoming the patient's resistance (a one-person psychology) to enable recall of the memory and affect; (3) that veridical recall is possible; and (4) that the curative aspect is to experience and express the affect that has been pent up (assuming that