Museums, mummy love, Moses, mythology, the mysteries of the mind and Auntie Maureen

Eighty years on from his death, people are still fascinated by Sigmund Freud - his theories on human behaviour and sexuality, and his influence on modern secular thinking - but a lesser-known fact about the man was his fascination with collecting antiquities, from the Greco-Roman world, the Orient and, inevitably, from Ancient Egypt.

It was, of course, the latter connection that was behind the event to which Madame Arcati, Hils, History Boy and I went on Thursday evening - Egyptomania in the time of Freud & Petrie - at our beloved Petrie Museum. In a variety of talks, exhibits and artefacts, the event explored the way a century of excavations of Egypt (from Napoleon to Lord Caernarvon) gripped the world, influenced its culture, and captivated even the "father of psychology" - whose life was coincidentally contemporaneous with that of "the father of archaeology" Flinders Petrie himself.


Two items from Freud's collection - a gilded mummy and an amulet of Mut.

The talks were fascinating, as one would expect. Our "maestro" of all things theatrically Egyptological, John J. Johnson, opened proceedings with an overview of how hieroglyphs [as the young Freud discovered illustrating the pages of his own family's Jewish bible], mummification [and public unwrapping of mummies] and the myriad archaeological artefacts that were constantly being uncovered and displayed in the grand museums of that imperial age [not least in the opulent Kunsthistorisches Museum in his native Vienna] contributed to Freud's own intellectual development, and his psychoanalytic methodology of uncovering the dreams, demons and inner fears of his patients. Then, in conversation with the Freudian scholar Professor Miriam Leonard, the "analysis of the analyst" continued.

In his lifetime, Freud collected around 600 Egyptian items, many of which he insisted on taking with him wherever he travelled. Indeed, he described collecting such antiquities as his own "obsession". Significantly, he only started doing so after the death of his own father, and among his most revered items were representations of Mut [the "mother goddess", often represented as a vulture, a creature who had appeared in young Freud's own early nightmares], of the phallic god of creation Min, and of the Sphynx, a creature that was identified mostly in mythology as the embodiment of a "man-eating" female - all philosophies that featured heavily in his work.


Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx by Ingres; a copy of which hung above Freud's psychoanalytic couch.

The culmination of Freud’s fascination with Egypt was his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, published in the year of his death 1939, which caused controversy with his argument that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian follower of the monotheistic Akhenaten, whose religion Moses transmitted to the Jews. And here, the overlap with Petrie really became clear - for it was his unearthing of Akhenaton's myriad treasures at Amarna from 1891 that drew the world's attention to this most revolutionary of all the pharaohs. Of course, the theory was somewhat flawed by investigating the actual timescales in which Amarna flourished and the ostensible date when Moses was supposed to have lived, but the ideas were, our expert pair agreed, worthy of examination.

It all sounds quite dry and dusty, but was actually a very entertaining evening. All the speakers [including the museum's curator Dr. Anna Garnett, who explained how Petrie pioneered the method of gauging timescales in archaeology by examining the evolutionary development of pots, a system still used today] have an entertaining way with words; a necessary skill when presenting difficult topics to a non-scholastic audience - and of course being in the atmospheric surroundings of this wonderfully quaint museum, furnished especially for this evening with rugs and (of course) a reproduction of that couch, helped immensely. The closing session was a world premiere of scenes from a new "dramatic work in progress" by Michael Eaton, in which he and actor Giles Croft imagined an actual meeting between Freud and Petrie [something that never happened in real life, of course]. Despite the Freudian theme, however, we all avoided getting our dreams analysed by the on-site "expert", artist Nikki Shaill [imagine!].



Most of the staff and volunteers were dressed, Downton Abbey-style, in glorious fin de siècle and Twenties frocks, beads and furs [hello, Helen!] - there was plenty of booze at the two pop-up bars, and the DJ "Auntie Maureen" was delightful, playing a selection of early 20th century numbers. And, fortuitously, she's published some of her Freudian output on the new-fangled interwebs for our delectation:


[or click here]

...as well as some Egyptian music:


[or click here]

The main exhibition Between Oedipus and the Sphinx: Freud and Egypt, of which this evening was part, continues at the Freud Museum in Hampstead until 27th October 2019.