The Abu Symbol

Being a museum curator by profession, I once asked a friend of mine who practices and professes psychiatry at Yale University whether a patient undergoing analysis is not sometimes influenced by the works of art displayed within range of the couch, particularly if a picture happens to be hung on the adjacent wall, directly in his line of vision. My friend acknowledged that this was the case, and that his own patients often remarked on a color print that occupied that strategic position in his consulting room, a backstage view into a circus tent that might have served as an illustration for Marcel Aymé's Le Nain. But it was only some years later when I was lecturing on the Nubian monuments, then threatened by inundation in the wake of the new Aswan dam, that I remembered having seen a picture within a picture of Sigmund Freud's study in Vienna. Over the carpet-smothered archetypal couch, and dominating the entire room, was an enormous mounted photograph of the great temple of Abu Simbel, its colossal statues of Ramesses II oriented toward the higher end of the couch, where the patient's head was propped.

The precise meaning of the temple's name, or rather the name of the place where it is situated, is not known. In the first half of the last century travelers called it 'Ipsamboul', evidently assimilating it to the more familiar name of the Turkish capital, but by the time Sigmund Freud was born 'Abu Simbel' had emerged as the accepted form. And this form of the name must, consciously or unconsciously, have held an extremely potent significance for Freud. To anyone so sensitive to homonyms as he was, 'Simbel' would have registered as German (and English) 'Symbol', while 'Abu', being almost identical to Hebrew abi, would have been equally recognizable as the Arabic word for 'father'. Whether Freud was entirely aware of the Abu Symbol is—according to his own principles—unimportant; if he did not realize its significance he may have been suppressing it, as, for man