Akhenaten полностью

and there can be no doubt that Akhenaten was such a figure for Freud. More than this, Akhenaten had a part to play in the development of psychoanalysis. Freud's enthusiastic comment that Karl Abraham's analysis of Akhenaten was a 'a great step forward in "orientation"' contains a significant pun. It was a step in the right direction, and that direction lay towards the east, the Orient. It intim­ates that Freud regarded Akhenaten as a test-ease for the transhistorical applic­ability of the Oedipus complex, a historical first who could authenticate the new science of psychoanalysis. The fainting fit episode in Munich, when both Jung and Freud momentarily took on Akhenaten's persona (according to Jung's account, at least), suggests that Akhenaten had a particular symbolic resonance for Freud at this time of crisis in his personal and professional life. Freud had no patience for what he called Jung's 'rampages of fantasy' about antiquity, especially those which blended classical and Christian imagery in a way that excluded Jews.² Later, at another moment of crisis, Freud returned to the history of Akhenaten in Moses and Monotheism, the last work published in his lifetime (1939) but started in about 1934. By this time Fascism was threatening to destroy European Jewry, and Freud's works had been burned as texts of the Jewish science' of psychoanalysis. I will come back to Moses and Monotheism shortly, but for the moment I want to account for Freud's intense interest in Akhenaten and why he returned to his story at fraught times in his life.

Freud's interest in Akhenaten was, of coursc, part of his broader interest in ancient Egypt and antiquity generally; his private collection of ancient objects is well known. This has been repeatedly studied in terms of its importance to Freud's psyche and the development of psychoanalysis, but is rarely put in its wider cultural setting of the range of Egypts available to people in Germany and Austria at that time. Consequently, these studies of Freud tend to imply that ancient Egypt was an amazing discovery of Freud's own, yet another instance of his intellectual bravura and inventiveness. ® But it is important to remember that Egypt in general - and Akhenaten in particular - had a high cultural profile in Germany and Austria from the 1880s onwards, so in many ways Freud was following the flow of general interest.

A neglected figure who helped sustain academic and popular curiosity about Egypt in Germany and Austria was the antiquities dealer Theodor Graf (1840­1903). Freud purchased some of the best - and most expensive - antiquities in his personal collection from Grafs business. Graf launched a successful career in Austria from his connections with Amarna. In 1888, he sold the Berlin Museum 160 items of Akhenaten's diplomatic correspondence, the so-called Amarna letters, to considerable public excitement. The rulers of the ancient city-states of Palestine, familiar from the pages of the Old Testament, emerged as real people in the correspondence from Akhenaten's archive. 'It was like a dream', observed Adolf Erman (1854—1937), the great German scholar who arranged the pur­chase of the letters. Graf went on to have an exclusive business in Vienna which supplied the Archduke Rainer of Austria (1827-1913) with Egyptian objects which were also exhibited publicly. These exhibitions of Grafs Egyptian objects were promoted in newspaper articles and illustrated catalogues, some of them written by his old schoolfriend, Georg Ebers (1837-98). Ebers had an extraordin­ary career, as Professor of Egyptology at Leipzig, journalist and best-selling novel­ist. His series of Egyptian-thcmcd romances (Varda, An Egyptian Princess, Cleopatra, and others) helped stimulate interest in Egyptian artefacts and keep it alive.⁴ Ebers was also uniquely placed to help Graf sell his antiquities from Egypt to a Jewish clientele, a market which expanded in the late 1890s, when the growth of Zionism made European Jews think about their ancient prcscncc in the eastern lands. Zionism offered a way to ethnic Jews, like Freud, of retaining their cultural identity without a return to the Judaic spirituality that reminded them uncomfortably of the ghettos in Poland and Austro-Hungary that many of them had recently left. Ebers was himself of Jewish origin, though his parents Meyer Moses Ebers and Martha Levysohn had changed their names to the discreetly undenominational 'Moritz' and 'Fanny' before Ebers was born. Nevertheless, he reinstated an ancient Jewish presence in Egypt in his catalogues of some of Grafs Egyptian objects. For example, in his guidebook to Grafs Roman period funerary portraits, he repeatedly refers to the Jews in Egypt. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Freud bought two of these portraits, one of which hung over his chair in the consulting room of his Vienna apartment.'