Scott Sprenger
120
[W]e have been inclined to take the […] view, that in mental life nothing which has
once been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved and that in
suitable circumstances […] it can once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp
what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field. We will
choose as an example the history of the Eternal City. . . . If [the observer] knows
enough – more than present day archaeology does – he may perhaps be able to trace
out in the plan of the city the whole course of [the wall of Aurelian] and outline of
the Roma Quadrata. […] There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in
the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the
past is preserved in historical sites like Rome.
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation
but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to
say, in which nothing that has come into existence will have passed away and all the
earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. . .
1
The point of insisting on Freud’s use of this literary “flight of
imagination” to leap from the ruined city to the inner debris of the
modern mind is not to criticize Freud for analogical thinking or to undercut psychoanalysis’s value as a legitimate human science (although
there are other reasons to do this), but to underscore the blurry frontier
between literature and social “science”. Literature has in the modern
academy become the poor cousin of the social sciences, although
many contemporary social sciences, including sociology, psychology
and even psychoanalysis, originally emerged from literary observations and figurations. Freud was a voracious reader of literature and
shamelessly lifted metaphors, analogies and mythical figures in developing his various models of the unconscious mind. Thus, while it has
been common practice for several decades to apply social scientific
methods such as psychoanalysis to literary criticism in order to lend it
“scientific” prestige and sophistication, we propose to do the opposite:
to show how a novelist such as Balzac used archaeological metaphors
to imagine a new science of the mind that anticipates psychoanalysis
while exposing its epistemological limits. Like Freud, Balzac was obsessed with archaeology and archaeological modes of narration. Also
like Freud, Balzac discovered powerful heuristic potential in archaeology as he began to suspect that adult psychopathologies were secretly rooted in forgotten or repressed childhood events. One major
___________________________
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York
and London: Norton, 1961), pp. 16-17.
120
[W]e have been inclined to take the […] view, that in mental life nothing which has
once been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved and that in
suitable circumstances […] it can once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp
what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field. We will
choose as an example the history of the Eternal City. . . . If [the observer] knows
enough – more than present day archaeology does – he may perhaps be able to trace
out in the plan of the city the whole course of [the wall of Aurelian] and outline of
the Roma Quadrata. […] There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in
the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the
past is preserved in historical sites like Rome.
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation
but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to
say, in which nothing that has come into existence will have passed away and all the
earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. . .
1
The point of insisting on Freud’s use of this literary “flight of
imagination” to leap from the ruined city to the inner debris of the
modern mind is not to criticize Freud for analogical thinking or to undercut psychoanalysis’s value as a legitimate human science (although
there are other reasons to do this), but to underscore the blurry frontier
between literature and social “science”. Literature has in the modern
academy become the poor cousin of the social sciences, although
many contemporary social sciences, including sociology, psychology
and even psychoanalysis, originally emerged from literary observations and figurations. Freud was a voracious reader of literature and
shamelessly lifted metaphors, analogies and mythical figures in developing his various models of the unconscious mind. Thus, while it has
been common practice for several decades to apply social scientific
methods such as psychoanalysis to literary criticism in order to lend it
“scientific” prestige and sophistication, we propose to do the opposite:
to show how a novelist such as Balzac used archaeological metaphors
to imagine a new science of the mind that anticipates psychoanalysis
while exposing its epistemological limits. Like Freud, Balzac was obsessed with archaeology and archaeological modes of narration. Also
like Freud, Balzac discovered powerful heuristic potential in archaeology as he began to suspect that adult psychopathologies were secretly rooted in forgotten or repressed childhood events. One major
___________________________
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York
and London: Norton, 1961), pp. 16-17.