Strata: In Their Own Words

The allure of ancient artifacts has long intrigued more than just archaeologists and Biblical scholars. Even renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a fascination for them. In The Age of Insight, Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel describes Freud’s keen interest in collecting antiquities.¹

[Freud’s] new-found passion was fueled by his early fascination with the past, with myths and with archaeology … Freud recognized parallels between the work of a psychotherapist and that of an archaeologist and even used archaeological metaphors to formulate psychoanalytic ideas. As he explained to one of his early patients, the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff): “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”