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Looking hard and long at the Philippson Bible, with which Jakob Freud delighted and instructed his little boy, Ana-Maria Rizzuto came to a realisation. A remarkable number of pieces in Sigmund Freud's collection of antiquities closely resembled illustrations in that Bible. Freud's antiquities famously crowded his office. Other than attesting to archaeology as a master metaphor of his thought, the collection had no organising theme that scholars discerned—beyond, that is, his pleasure in the pieces and persisting commitment to collecting them. Arrayed in tight orderliness on his shelves, table-tops and writing desk, the antiquities proved the silent companions of his psychoanalytic work. The largest number were Egyptian; the bias of the Philippson illustrations was too. What if those illustrations from childhood, by unconscious visual memory, fuelled Freud's adult collecting? The perception had promise, and fascinating ramifications, which Rizzuto explores with lovely subtlety in this original and important book.
Freud began to buy ancient artefacts just after his father's death. Thus the collection was launched concurrently with his self-analysis and the discoveries that led to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Manifestly, although less obviously than the remarkable technique, observation, theory-building and writing, the antiquities were associated with his intense and tumultuous after-shock and sustained, creative sublimation that ensued upon his father's death. But how? If really part of the story, what part?
Rizzuto weaves both the antiquities and the family Bible into the pattern she traces of Freud's
rejection of God. It was a process that took conscious hold in adolescence, wavered briefly when he studied philosophy with Brentano at the university of Vienna, and was consolidated in a complicated fashion when his father died. Once, she reminds us, God had a positive valence for him, when his nurse took him as a toddler to her church and he would return to serm