It is difficult to see how these two polarities can be reconciled in writing an archaeology of Amarna. Michacl Shanks, one of the main critics of current proccssual archaeological excavations like those at Amarna, advocates the construction of what he calls an 'effective history' in which 'the independence, difference and life of the past answer back with a challenge to the present'. '8 Such a history avoids veneration, condemnation or appropriation of the past, and above all refuses to impose a neat or satisfying homogeneity upon it. It is essentially pluralistic, admitting a variety of truths of equal validity. More interestingly for my project, it also allows the claims of minorities and socially repressed groups to their own archaeologies. This has been recognised as legitimate in 'unearthing and objectifying alternative viewpoints and social dispositions, contributing to social change'.39
Modern debates around the meaning of Amarna show how its archaeological past is anything but apolitical. Akhenaten and Amarna have a potent role as cultural and political capital: not frozen in time as an area of finished historical activity, but a lively and ever-continuing arena for contention and argument. Different individuals understand the same material quite differently, according to how they are placed. Following from this, the next two chapters examine how Akhenaten and the history of the Amarna period have been appropriated by radically different groups, all of whom, for very different reasons, seek forms of legitimation from it. All of these depend, in one way or another, on individual rereadings of the contested archaeologies of Amarna. In May 1935, Sigmund Freud read an account of the excavations at Amarna, then in their penultimate season, and wrote to a friend: 'If I were a millionaire, I would finance the continuation of these excavations.'60 Freud had his own, very personal investment in Amarna, which is the point of departure for the next chapter.
PROTESTANTS, PSYCHOANALYSTS AND FASCISTS
Marvellous, marvellous! Amcnhotcp IV illuminated psychoanalyti- cally. That is certainly a great step forward in 'orientation'. Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham, 14 January 1912 (Freud 1965:
115)
There is an Akhenaten-related anecdote about Sigmund Freud which is often retold by his biographers without the Egyptian connection. It conccrns a fainting fit Freud suffered in the autumn of 1912. The occasion was a meeting in Munich of Freud's 'inner circle' of psychoanalytic pioneers, whose other members were Karl Abraham (1877-1925), Ernest Jones (1879-1958) and most famously Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). For some time Freud had regardedjung as his most gifted pupil and his intellectual heir, but earlier that year Jung's public lectures in America had questioned some of Freud's principal theories about the psyche - infantile sexuality, the sexual origin of neurosis, and the Oedipus complex. His relationship with Jung deteriorated and the future of psychoanalysis seemed threatened. The atmosphere in Munich was uncomfortable when Freud, Jung and the others sat down to lunch. The conversation turned to Akhenaten. This is not as surprising as it may seem. Freud and Jung were both interested in ancient Egypt, and Abraham had recently published a detailed psychoanalytic dissection of Akhenaten informed by the Oedipus complex. Freud had encouragcd Abraham to research the possible links of ancient Egypt with psychoanalysis as early as 1907, even giving him two Egyptian statuettes as an incentive. Would ancient Egypt be the place that offered the psychoanalyst access to the hidden and the originary? Over lunch, Freud and the others discussed approvingly Abraham's interpretation of Akhenaten as a mother-fixated neurotic who destroyed his father's monuments out of a desire to erase him and replace him with an ideal fantasy father, the Aten. Jung was annoyed. He argued that Akhenaten was a creative and profoundly religious man who honoured his father's memory and had no hostile impulses towards him. For Freud, anxious about Jung's rejection of his own ideas and their worsening relationship, this talk of ungrateful sons destroying their fathers' heritage was a little too much. He slid off his chair in a faint. Jung picked Freud up and carried him to a sofa. He later wrote that he would never forget the look Freud gave him. 'In his weakness he looked at me as if I were his father. Whatever other causes may have contributed to this faint - the atmosphere was very tense - the fantasy of father-murder was common to both cases'.1 Jung is referring here to the 'cases' of both Akhenaten and Freud).
Sigmund Freud was drawn to iconic figures from history. He was especially attracted to people who had brilliant ideas but were misunderstood in their time
he admired Oliver Cromwell so much that he named one of his sons after him
