1

The Conscientious Archaeologist

Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, and the Excavation of the Psyche

Alexi Louis Horowitz

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Or so were told in the opening lines of Joan
Didions 1979 essay The White Album. For Didion, storytelling is both the medium through
which individuals construct a notion of the self and the means through which they make sense of
the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience, in order to function in the world.
We frame ourselves, in other words our desires, our fears, our relationshipsin structures
built out of language. We confine the chaos and cacophony of our everyday lives into ordered
sequences through, the imposition, as Didion puts it, of a narrative line upon disparate
images.
1
Reading the works of Sigmund Freud, one gets the feeling that had he lived to see, or
rather read, the late 1970s, he would probably have agreed with her, at least in part. Freuds
famous couch was, after all, nothing if not a repository of stories.
2

Where Freud would almost certainly have differed from Didion is in the importance he
would have placed on the stories we do not tell, the memories we do not acknowledge, the
unexcavated artifacts of the past, and conflicted parts of the self that lie hidden beneath the
apparent coherence of our personalities, our proclamations, and our narratives. For Freud, we
are just as much the things we do not say as those that we do. Despite the fact that towards the
outside the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation, Freud, reminds us that
below the surface lies an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which
it [the ego] serves as a kind of facade.
3
In opposition to the tidy narrative lines we draw around
our experiences and motivations in our presentation to the outside world, we are, in actuality,
roiling crockpots of contradictory desire.

1
Joan Didion, The White Album(New York: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979), 5.
2
Freud did not, of course, restrict his models of the psyche, the id, ego, and super ego to the realm of
exclusively linguistic phenomena.
3
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, Norton pbk. ed.. ed.(New York: New York : W.W.
Norton, 1995), 724.
2

For many individuals, this state of repression or active forgetting, is what allows them to
function in the world; it is business as usual. This is, as Nietzsche expressed it in The Genealogy of
Morals, the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic
order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no
happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.
4
But for those
who have developed neuroseswho have repressed traumatic experiences or forbidden desires so
deeply as to have disrupted the expression of their erotic impulses and manifested
correspondingly painful and debilitating symptoms the stories we tell are, in many respects,
the very structures that hold us back, rigid psychic prisons that restrain us from living full,
healthy, and vital lives. Indeed, Freuds entire aim in developing the psychoanalytic method
seems to have been toward finding a productive means of complicating the stories we tell about
ourselves in order to live. The promise of psychoanalysis comes in offering a means for us to
alienate ourselves from our stories, to allow us to see behind them, to recognize their selective
and fictional aspects, and to unify the disparate selves that reside within us through an
excavation of the psyche and a reinterpretation of the self.
Excavation is an important concept in Freuds work. While he doesnt exactly employ it
as a technical term, his frequent reference to excavation as an analogy for analysis gestures toward
the central position of the archaeological metaphor in the psychoanalytic project. A couple of
pages into his famous late-career essay Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, Freud makes
an important analogy between the city of Rome, and the individual human psyche: "Now let us,
by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a physical entity
with a similarly long and copious pastan entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once
come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to
exist alongside the latest one."
5
The psyche, Freud suggests, just like the city, is constantly
transforming in time. Psychic structures, like their architectural analogues, are built, some are
destroyed, and others are buried beneath the steady accretion of new experiences and memories.

4
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale,
and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Vintage Books ed.. ed., Ecce Homo (New York: New York : Vintage
Books, 1989), 58.
5
Freud, The Freud Reader, 726.
3

Just as in the development of the individual, some periods in the citys history are particularly
formative in determining its avenues of future growth. As Freud wrote of the latency period in
Theories of Sexuality: It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the
mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict
its flowdisgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals.
6
So the
blueprint for the city is constructed, through experiences with objects of desire and impositions
from the external world on the propriety of certain objects over other, differing forces and
constraints interacting and overlapping over time. And so, just as the contemporary ancient city
holds myriad antiquities and remnants of its former developmental manifestations so too does
the individual psyche. As Freud puts it: There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried
in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings.
7

Psychoanalysis, in this reading, is the process of excavating the ancient city that is the
psyche, an exploration of the chaotic realm of the unconscious where thoughts live very
comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes
8
The initial
stages of analysis allow the analysand to externalize their mental cityscape to the visiting
analyst/archaeologist through conversation, of providing the analyst a kind of walking tour of
the psychoscape. The analysts role then, as they figuratively meander the streets of the patients
psyche, is to notice the odd shortcuts, the unexplained rises in topography, to get a sense, in
short, of the hidden histories and obscured structures that lurk beneath its surface by reading the
city as it is presented over the course of many conversations. Remnants of our repressed
experiences remain on the surface of the psychoscape, even when their foundations remain
obscured. This is illustrated in the case of Dora, one of Freuds most famous patients, for
instance, when she displays knowledge of the variety of sexual acts, But the question of where
her knowledge came from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had
forgotten the source of all her information on this subject.
9
Like the citizens or visitors of a
contemporary city forget the hidden remnants of its past, the individual loses conscious

6
Ibid., 261.
"
#$%&'( ")*'
8
Ibid., 205.
9
Ibid.
4

knowledge of their former selves, of the experiences and desires that have determined the
topography and design of the city that is their psyche. More importantly for the analyst, the
individual forgets the psychic phenomena that then continue to determine and constrain the
flow of libidinal energy within them. These forgotten phenomena are the objects of the
psychoanalysts hunt. As Freud described it to one of his patients: The psychologist, like the
archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patients psyche, before
coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.
10
The analyst thus sifts, over the course of the
conversations, through the sediment of both the patients stories, and their physical behavior, in
search of repressed memories, trauma, and erotic desires, for the keyso to speakto unlock
the black box of the neurotic psyche.
In Freuds early methodology the information gleaned from this process was used to
aggressively assail the patients modes of interpretation, to deconstruct their narrative
constructions of self and replace them with the analysts own pathologized interpretations. This
technique is most apparent in Freuds Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, the case of
Dora, where every new piece of information unveiled over the course of their conversations,
whether from memories, stories, responses to questions or fragments from dreams, is employed
as ammunition in Freuds efforts to reinterpret Doras desires and memories, each detail
becoming a fact which I [Freud] did not fail to use against her.
11
But Doras case and her
premature departure from psychoanalytic treatment represented, as Freud made clear in the last
pages of Fragment, a major misstep in his therapeutic technique. By failing to recognize Doras
transferenceher remapping of former displaced desires onto her analyst Freud was unable to
compel Dora to reevaluate her interpretations of her life story, and thereby unable to bring the
repressed memories and desires of her unconscious into the realm of conscious consideration. As
Freud suggests at the end of Fragments, it is only after the transference has been resolved that a
patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been
constructed during the analysis. Only upon the confrontation of their transference will the
patient begin to notice the incompleteness of their interpretations, to recognize the idiosyncrasies

10
Stephen Scully, "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch," Arion 5, no. 2 (1997): 25.
11
Freud, The Freud Reader, 203.
5

and incompatibilities that arise within her narrative, and the distorting effects of the repressed
elements of her unconscious.
Jonathan Lear, writing on Dora and the concept of transference in his book Freud,
characterizes Freuds methodological shift following the case as analogous to the difference
between an archaeological excavation and surface archaeology.
12
Instead of an active and
penetrating search for repressed psychic material followed by aggressive confrontation with and
deconstruction of the patients interpretations, as Freud practiced with Dora, the analyst comes,
in Freuds later methodological formulation, to assume a more passive role in the process,
inciting the patient to come to their own conclusions and realizations about their own
transferences, and the idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and myopia that characterize their narratives.
As Lear puts it: It will be his non-aggressive, non-erotic openness that will help Dora recognize
the falsity of her experience.
13
But this reformulation of the psychoanalytic method away from
the more intrusive techniques we might more easily associate with the term excavation is, as
Lear pointed out, still a kind of archaeology of the psyche. The reason it is so is not only because
the analyst still searches for deeply buried artifacts of the patients psychic past. It is also, and
more importantly, because the practice of archaeology is also a kind of narrative construction.
Our conscious notions of self-hood are linked to memories, and ignore unconscious or buried
ones. Our identities are constellations of particular conscious memories and desires into an
interpretive framework. The analyst, like the archaeologist, unearths new evidence and uses it to
complicate our understanding of our selves in the present, to show the incompleteness of our
conscious interpretations, and to thereby offer the newly discovered psychic artifacts for
inclusion into our conscious narratives.
The archaeologist, in other words, does not only dig. The archaeologist is also a builder,
a maker of meaning. The psychoanalyst must remember, then, that both enterprises are
processes of excavation and of interpretation, and take Freuds reminder to heart: like a
conscientious archaeologist, I have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic

12
Jonathan Lear, Freud(New York: Routledge, 2005), 135.
13
Ibid., 142.
6

parts end and my constructions begin.
14
Freud reminds us that the psyche, much like the city, is
not just what it appears to be on the surface, but contains within it the remnants and ripples of
everything it has ever been, everything it has ever experienced. By gently problematizing the
analysands interpretive choices and narrative constructions of identity, by offering them a space
in which to playfully reexamine their memories and desires, they may come to view them as the
contingent, selective, repressive facades they really are, and to expand their confines to include
the deeper, more contradictory inner landscape of desires, fears, and emotions that simmer
always in the deep recesses of our unconscious. As the Wolf-Man, one of Freuds most famous
patients, later wrote of his psychoanalytic treatment: There was always a feeling of sacred peace
and quiet [reminiscent not so much of] a doctors office but rather of an archaeologists study.
Here were all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the laymen recognized as
archaeological finds from ancient Egypt.
15
Just as the archaeologist seeks the treasures of
antiquity to shed light on how human civilization has developed, and why it is the way it is,
Freud, through his psychoanalytic theory, offers us an insight into the multiplicity of selves that
we have buried within us, and with work, a means of reconciling them. So while he may have
agreed with the observation that we tell stories in order to live, he might have preferred it with
a slight amendment: We deconstruct and reinterpret the stories we tell in order to live, in order
to live more fully.
Works Cited

Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. edited by Peter Gay. Norton pbk. ed.. ed. New York: New York : W.W.
Norton, 1995.
Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo. edited by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, R. J.
Hollingdale and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Vintage Books ed.. ed. New York: New York :
Vintage Books, 1989.
Scully, Stephen. "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch." Arion 5, no. 2 (1997): 222-33.


14
Freud, The Freud Reader, 176.
15
Scully, "Freud's Antiquities: A View from the Couch," 225.