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Göbekli Tepe, thought to date back to the 10th and 9th millennium BC, was discovered by the American archaeologist Klaus Schmidt near Urfa in 1994. Klaus Schmidt's discovery of Göbekli Tepe brought to light the earliest man-made cult architecture ever discovered. This impressive structure led Schmidt to say that “this discovery is the most important discovery of my professional life”. About a hundred years before Klaus Schmidt's discovery of Göbekli Tepe, Sigmund Freud, who said in Vienna that his destiny was to discover what was obvious, gave birth to a theory, psychoanalysis, by diving into “the depths of the psyche layer by layer” with his self-analysis. According to Freud, using a method similar to that of archaeology to understand the human psyche is the only way that promises success. In psychoanalysis the analysand has theories about his/her own life, about his /her past, about everything that descends on him/her. The analysis is an effort to illuminate and analyse these theories, i.e. to deconstruct them. This is because these theories stem from constructs formed since childhood in relation with the other. Archaeologists, in a sense, try to find what has been lost, to repair and protect what has been worn out, and to carry this past to immortality by searching the past. They are interested in the four million years of human history just like psychoanalysts searching for the truths of the psyche. Archaeology is a branch of science that is wrapped in the present while searching for the past. The data belong to the past, but the discovery, evaluation and interpretation of this data is an effort of the present.
What was the force that drove both Freud and Schmidt to search for the dark unknown, even if their discoveries were in different areas and at different times? Based on this question, this article discusses the effort to find, understand and question the truth through psychoanalysis and archaeology, which are two different disciplines, via the example of “Göbekli Tepe”.