Abstract
If we find ourselves invited into the home of a new friend and left alone for 5 or 10 min, most of us I suspect would use the time to examine the books on the shelves. Such a surreptitious inspection will generally provide us with a sense as to our host’s interests, his tastes, and even his obsessions. Were our host Sigmund Freud, we might discover some surprises among his collection. There would be, for instance, a disproportionate number of books about ancient Egyptian history, art, and mythology. In fact, Freud amassed more books on ancient Egypt than any other subject apart from psychology and allied disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
Because Osiris is almost always viewed as a chthonic deity, it is hard to see him as the sun. Ramessid images that depict the fusion of Ra and Osiris do so as a kind of fusion of the body (Osiris) and soul (Ra) of god with the idea being more one of the totality of opposites as in earth + heaven. My thanks to Professor Richard Wilkinson of the University of Arizona for informing me of the received view of this matter.
- 2.
Signed letter from Anna Freud to Robert W. Rieber, May 8, 1975, printed stationery (in R.W. Rieber’s papers and letters). Thanking me for my letter on May 1 to speak at the New York Academy of Sciences Conference and gives an apology for not being able to attend. She continues, “To answer your further question: Yes, my father had the book by Dr. Preyer in his library and he gave it to me to read when I was a young teacher. But, I do not think that his own work was influenced by Dr. Preyer’s writings. Yours sincerely, Anna Freud.”
- 3.
Levi-Bruhl semiretracted his views in later life, and other anthropologists in England such as Evans-Pritchard and Rivers had little time for the primitive man/primitive mind connection.
- 4.
The generation gap was quite prominent in the 1960s and 1970s in the West and, at the time, was commonly acknowledged as a serious problem. However, today it is hardly acknowledged as a problem at all, and it is just that that makes it all the more dangerous. Unnoticed, it is more likely to continue and cause more harm.
- 5.
In writing about his own analysis of dreams, Freud, in recalling a dream from his early childhood, sees his mother in a peaceful sleeping state being carried into the room by several people with bird beaks and laid upon a bed. The dream was a nightmare, and Freud woke up screaming. Freud believed that the tall bird-like figures were derived from the illustrations to the Philippson’s bible. He fancied that they must have been gods with falcon heads from an ancient Egyptian funereal relief (Freud 1976, p. 163 and Freud 1900–1901).
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Rieber, R.W. (2012). From the Pharaohs to Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Magical Egyptian Tradition. In: Freud on Interpretation. Path in Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0637-2_2
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