If Oedipus was an Egyptian

Abstract

Freud's archaeological collection peopled his work rooms with sublimated expressions of eternal, universal desires. I suggest here that these tangible remnants from the long buried past resonated with psychic representations and dream figures in Freud's own internal world, which, nevertheless, were not always consciously available to him. Despite a fascination with Egyptology evidenced in his antiquities, library and less conventional works, Freud focused on aspects of the Greek oedipal legend in his theoretical writing, neglecting Egyptian myths associated with‘prehistoric’realms of the archaic mother and Osirian/Mosaic father. I argue that convergence of traumatic events in his early childhood contributed to this delimiting Graeco-Roman filter, and that accessibility to the‘dark continent’was hampered by resistances his own self-analysis could not penetrate but which may have been worked through in the transference had he had an analyst other than himself.