CRETAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREUDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: H.D’S MINOAN ANALYSIS WITH FREUD IN 1933

Abstract

In 1931 the first reference to Minoan archaeology appeared in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. Eight years later, in his last published work, Moses and Monotheism, ancient Crete was invoked in support of one of his most contentious, unfashionable and crazy-seeming ideas – his theory of inherited memory. This chapter examines the theoretical role played by the Minoan past in Freud’s published writings, and explores the analysis of a patient – the poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle – in which Cretan archaeology was actually used as a diagnostic tool. I argue that Freud’s intricate engagement with the work of Arthur Evans in the 1930s goes some way to explaining why he continued to subscribe to the long-discredited theory of racial memory.