FREUD WAS FASCINATED by the history, mythology, and archaeology of ancient civilizations, especially the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. In his 1937 essay “Konstruktionen in der Analyse” (“Constructions in Analysis”), he brings this interest into his theorization, developing an archaeological analogy: “[the analyst's] task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it,” a task which he says, “resembles to a great extent an archaeologist's excavation.” Both the analyst and archaeologist form constructions from what remains based on limited information, both have to face various kinds of difficulties and errors, and both are concerned with the “relative age” of the various traces.
The personal unconscious is layered, the repressed is buried, dreams are messages from the deep—this is the language of archaeology. To me, as a philosopher of science, this comparison between archaeology and psychoanalytic work is exceedingly strong and generative. In a book on maps, cartography, GIS, analogy, philosophy, and science, When Maps Become the World, I generated the tool of assumption archaeology for diagnosing and unraveling systems of assumptions (and biases) in everyday life and in science, which expresses what I call a “theoretical unconscious.” A property of collectives as well as of individuals, the theoretical unconscious is something like the hidden part of a scientific paradigm or theoretical perspective. Assumption archaeology helps block or undo the inappropriate conflation and confusion of model with world, a set of fallacies I baptized pernicious reification.
In developing assumption archaeology as a method, I was inspired by an eloquent book, Archaeology and Modernity, which argued that “[Archaeology] evokes notions of the repressed, the lost and the forgotten, and of the drama of discovery, which are often spatialised in terms of the relationship between depth and surface.” Undoubtedly, archaeology is a brilliant analogy for depth work, whether into our minds and souls, or into the hidden and deep recesses and crevices of scientific theory.
An example I used to introduce assumption archaeology in When Maps Become the World is the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, a standard idealized model in the theory of population genetics, a field about which I also wrote a book: Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics. As is familiar to mathematical geneticists, this equilibrium model shows that gene frequencies will stay the same over generations as long as there are no evolutionary forces acting such as mutation, migration, and, most famously, natural selection. Now, we can use assumption archaeology to uncover multiple assumptions, not always so clearly stated, that must be satisfied for the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium model to hold—for instance, that population sizes are infinite, mating is random, and no individuals migrate across populations. But problems ensue when the theoretical researcher or experimental designer is not explicit about the nature and the exact assumptions being deployed in particular cases. For example, we might apply the idealized and abstracted Hardy-Weinberg model indiscriminately to myriad populations of species with, say, highly limited population sizes or assortative mating. For such populations, Hardy-Weinberg assumptions simply do not hold. Such an idealized model would then overexplain, and would be universalized, narrowed, and ontologized—conflated with the world—in inappropriate ways. This is what I mean by pernicious reification.
Psychoanalysts, despite their commitment to examining the unconscious, are not immune to pernicious reification, especially if they fail to question their theoretical assumptions or believe these assumptions capture too much—perhaps even everything—about a patient. Patients, too, might be said to suffer from a sort of pernicious reification if they hold a too-rigid self-image or are trapped by unexamined psychic forces. Just as a clinician needs to be aware of theoretical assumptions in order to best interpret patient patterns or symptoms, so a patient needs to become aware of unconscious assumptions to best gain personal insight, heal, and grow.
One way of avoiding pernicious reification is to examine the metaphors and analogies that guide our thinking—while understanding that, precisely as metaphors and analogies, they have limits. Returning to Freud, even by his own admission, there are important differences—disanalogies—between psychoanalytical and archaeological work. For instance, archaeological sites almost always involve extreme amounts of destruction, whereas therapy can dredge up from the depths of the psyche discoveries akin to Pompeii or Tutankhamen's tomb, seemingly without such tremendous damage. I still believe that there is something to all this digging imagery, but my point here is that the diving analogy for therapy works swimmingly, illuminating psychoanalytic practice in new ways. (Back in my home pond of philosophy of science, I leave a theorization of assumption diving into the theoretical unconscious of science as an exercise for a later day.) —RGW