Oral, anal, genital

Sigmund Freud is often associated with a psychoanalyst’s leather couch. Now I know better after dipping into the multi-volume compilation of his writings.

Two weeks ago some of my students in Sophia University invited me to buy something from their jumble sale to raise money for an NGO helping children in the Philippines. I browsed through boxes of used books in English and Spanish that they received as donations from faculty members. One of the books was “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things” by Freud. When I leafed through it I was surprised that Freud wrote in simple language. Freud came out so different from the thinker I remember from the college Psychology class where complex terms like Id, Ego, Super-ego and Oedipus complex were taught and discussed more elaborately.

When I checked out the Freud shelf in the library, I was drawn to his writings on literature and the arts. Freud wrote an essay giving an interpretation of Michelangelo’s “Moses” different from those of other art historians: Freud wrote a psycho-history of Leonardo da Vinci drawing insights from the artist’s childhood and his being left-handed; his analysis of Medusa’s head made my world spin. Filipinos know Medusa as the nemesis of Darna. Greek legend says all those who see Medusa turn to stone. Darna’s enemy casts destructive laser beams from her eyes. Freud says the horror of seeing Medusa’s head depicts the male fear of castration! Now, what would Freud say about Darna’s sexually suggestive costume?

One of the great things about open-shelf libraries is that you are able to browse and end up with books you did not originally set out to find, like a collection of essays on Freud as an antique collector, which made me regret not visiting the Freud Museum in London. Freud started collecting antiques from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and China  (mostly small statues) in 1896 after the death of his father. What he collected, when he collected, why he collected are questions relevant to psychoanalysts because our likes and dislikes reveal and conceal a lot about ourselves, more than we care to admit. Freud did not have the funds to acquire major antiques but he got the best that he could afford. He did not buy blindly but consulted experts and built up a personal archeological reference library. By the time Freud died in 1939 he had collected over 2,000 museum-quality objects, marking a “hobby” or a journey not in space but in time.

When he applied to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 he was anxious about both the clearance for his family and his collection. The antiques were naturally undervalued and were not deemed important enough to stay in Austria. When he settled in Maresfield Gardens, London, these antiques made his house into a home. Every piece was set in a particular place, thus recreating, in part, the Vienna home he was used to. Unfortunately, he died after having lived only a year in London, without leaving any writings about his collection and what each piece meant to him. For this we turn to his contemporaries, like one of his patients who recalled that Freud’s Vienna apartment looked more like a museum than a doctor’s office. Then there was Freud’s housekeeper who recalled that he greeted a statue of a Chinese scholar on his table each day upon entering his study.

There are publications on the individual objects in the Freud collection by art historians, but a compilation of scholarly articles on Freud’s collection is quite a read. Various authors investigated the way in which Freud displayed his collection. One author analyzed the objects displayed in glass-front cabinets that looked like caskets. This mode of display allowed Freud to look at the objects, while the antiques could also look out at him. Another author studied the arrangement of his statuettes and how these were arranged like a Greek chorus on his desk, on shelves, on the walls, etc.

Freud’s desk had, among many things, statuettes facing him. At the center was a bronze image of Athena, the goddess of learning, and behind her was a small Chinese screen decorated with vines and the figure of a scholar. At the edge of his writing pad were the following: a bronze figure of a Chinese scholar, the one he greeted every morning when he entered his study; a bronze statue of the Eygptian god Ptah, who created the world by speech and thought alone; the Etruscan balsamarium, a double-headed figure who could see in more than one direction; and the Baboon of Thoth, patron of all intellectual pursuits and writing. Was this desk arrangement purely aesthetic or was it a way for Freud to test his thoughts and writings on a mute, protective and sympathetic audience?

Freud had two pleasures: smoking and collecting. These are said to reflect two of the three stages of sexual development: smoking reflects the desire to satisfy an infant’s first sensual pleasure—the oral—in suckling; collecting reflects the anal stage characterized by the second pleasure—retention or defecation. When a collector shells out money to acquire an object or retains it to buy something better, he is in the anal stage. How is the third stage, the genital, manifested by collectors and their habits? After reading Freud, I could never look at my collector friends the same way as I did before: their collections have been reduced to the oral, anal and genital; and their passion is reflective of suckling, defecation and lust.

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