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 capitaclass="underline" 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
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.'