Freud’s Egyptian Photographs: Scenes from a Library

Abstract

Sigmund Freud fantasized Egyptian antiquity throughout his life, culminating in his Moses and Monotheism (1939). Ancient Egypt was represented in the visual culture of his personal library, where meaningful constellations of photographs, captions, and texts catalyzed to feed his historical imagination. In this material, the photography of “art” (sculpture, archaeological fragments) was hardly separable from the new ethnographic photography that was so closely aligned with medical documentation. All of these images belonged to a common body of visual knowledge. These visual resources shaped Freud’s views of cultural history, evident in Moses and Monotheism, where antiquity and ethnography interfaced within a highly imaginative historical narrative.