>In the opening pages of Civilisation & Its Discontents, Freud makes some
>interesting remarks about the nature of memory and psychic structure in a
>metaphorical pasage about the architectural history of Rome. Malcolm Bowie
>once memorably suggested that this could provide the basis for thinking
>Freud as town planner!
thanks Mark for reminding me, i just read a reference to the same
passage, and luckily have the book, unread, from which to quote:
[it reminds me of two things: one, i think it was Foucault who said
'the archaeology of mind' or the 'ruins of the mind', which for me
strikes at the poetry of an archaeo-architectural methodology. and
second, i was at the Rodin museum in Paris and saw a sculpture of
a womans head with a greek temple built on top of her head...bc]
"This brings us to the more general problem of preservation in the sphere
of the mind. The subject has hardly been studies as yet; but it is so
attractive and important that we may be allowed to turn our attention
to it for a little, even though our excuse is insufficient. Since we
overcame the error of supposing that the forgetting we are familiar
with signified a destruction of the memory-trace - that is, its
annihiliation - we have been inclined to take the opposite view,
that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -
that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circum-
stances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can
once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this assumpt-
ion involves by taking an analogy from another field. We will choose
as an example the history of the Eternal City. Historians tell us that
the oldest Rome was the ~Roma~Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the
Palatine. Then followed the phase of the ~Septimontium, a federation
of the settlements on the different hills; after that came the city
bounded by the Servian wall; and later still, after all the trans-
formations during the periods of the republic and the early Caesars,
the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls. We
will not follow the changes which the city went through any further,
but we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose
to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical
knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome
of to-day. Except for a few gaps, [s|he] will see the wall of Aurelian
almost unchanged. In some places [s|he] will be able to find sections
of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to
light. If [s|he] knows enough - more than persent-day archaeology
does - [s|he] may perhaps be able to trace out in the plan of the
city the whole course of that wall and the outline of the ~Roma
~Quadrata. Of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area
[s|he] will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist
no longer. The best information about Rome in the republican era
would only enable [him|her] at the most to point out the sites
where the temples and public buildings of that period stood. Their
place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of
later restorations made after fires or destruction. It is hardly
necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are
found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has
grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. 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 once come into existence will have passed
and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist along-
side the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of
the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still
be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle
of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beaut-
iful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so
on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo
Caffarelli would once more stand - without the Palazzo having
to be removed - the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this
not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw
it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan
forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta netefixes. Where the
Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero's
vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should
find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us
by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected
by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting
the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple
over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only
have to change the direction of his glance or his position in
order to call up the one view or the other.
There is clearly no
point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to
things unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent
historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by
juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two
different contents. Our attempt seems to be an idle game.
It has only one justification. It shows us how far we are
from mastering the characteristics of mental life by
representing them in pictorial terms.
There is one further
objection which has to be considered. The question may be
raised why we chose precisely the past of a ~city to compare
with the past of the mind. The assumption that everything past
is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition
that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its
tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But
destructive influences which can be compared to causes of
illness like these are never lacking in the history of a
city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome,
and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from
the visitations of an enemy. Demolitions and replacement of
buildings occur in the course of the most peaceful develop-
ment of a city. A city is thus ~a~priori unsuited for a
comparison of this sort with a mental organism.
We bow to
this objection; and, abandoning our attempt to draw a
striking contrast, we will turn instead to what is after
all a more closely related object of comparison - the body
of an animal or a human being..." [pp.16-18 ]
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1961
W.W. Norton & Company, Translated & Edited by James Strachey
>interesting remarks about the nature of memory and psychic structure in a
>metaphorical pasage about the architectural history of Rome. Malcolm Bowie
>once memorably suggested that this could provide the basis for thinking
>Freud as town planner!
thanks Mark for reminding me, i just read a reference to the same
passage, and luckily have the book, unread, from which to quote:
[it reminds me of two things: one, i think it was Foucault who said
'the archaeology of mind' or the 'ruins of the mind', which for me
strikes at the poetry of an archaeo-architectural methodology. and
second, i was at the Rodin museum in Paris and saw a sculpture of
a womans head with a greek temple built on top of her head...bc]
"This brings us to the more general problem of preservation in the sphere
of the mind. The subject has hardly been studies as yet; but it is so
attractive and important that we may be allowed to turn our attention
to it for a little, even though our excuse is insufficient. Since we
overcame the error of supposing that the forgetting we are familiar
with signified a destruction of the memory-trace - that is, its
annihiliation - we have been inclined to take the opposite view,
that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -
that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circum-
stances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can
once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this assumpt-
ion involves by taking an analogy from another field. We will choose
as an example the history of the Eternal City. Historians tell us that
the oldest Rome was the ~Roma~Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the
Palatine. Then followed the phase of the ~Septimontium, a federation
of the settlements on the different hills; after that came the city
bounded by the Servian wall; and later still, after all the trans-
formations during the periods of the republic and the early Caesars,
the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls. We
will not follow the changes which the city went through any further,
but we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose
to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical
knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome
of to-day. Except for a few gaps, [s|he] will see the wall of Aurelian
almost unchanged. In some places [s|he] will be able to find sections
of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to
light. If [s|he] knows enough - more than persent-day archaeology
does - [s|he] may perhaps be able to trace out in the plan of the
city the whole course of that wall and the outline of the ~Roma
~Quadrata. Of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area
[s|he] will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist
no longer. The best information about Rome in the republican era
would only enable [him|her] at the most to point out the sites
where the temples and public buildings of that period stood. Their
place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of
later restorations made after fires or destruction. It is hardly
necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are
found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has
grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. 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 once come into existence will have passed
and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist along-
side the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of
the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still
be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle
of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beaut-
iful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so
on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo
Caffarelli would once more stand - without the Palazzo having
to be removed - the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this
not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw
it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan
forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta netefixes. Where the
Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero's
vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should
find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us
by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected
by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting
the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple
over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only
have to change the direction of his glance or his position in
order to call up the one view or the other.
There is clearly no
point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to
things unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent
historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by
juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two
different contents. Our attempt seems to be an idle game.
It has only one justification. It shows us how far we are
from mastering the characteristics of mental life by
representing them in pictorial terms.
There is one further
objection which has to be considered. The question may be
raised why we chose precisely the past of a ~city to compare
with the past of the mind. The assumption that everything past
is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition
that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its
tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But
destructive influences which can be compared to causes of
illness like these are never lacking in the history of a
city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome,
and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from
the visitations of an enemy. Demolitions and replacement of
buildings occur in the course of the most peaceful develop-
ment of a city. A city is thus ~a~priori unsuited for a
comparison of this sort with a mental organism.
We bow to
this objection; and, abandoning our attempt to draw a
striking contrast, we will turn instead to what is after
all a more closely related object of comparison - the body
of an animal or a human being..." [pp.16-18 ]
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1961
W.W. Norton & Company, Translated & Edited by James Strachey