Why did Sigmund Freud abandon his Roman example?
Remember that Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, had turned to Rome in order to show how the past lingered on in the minds of human beings. He first conjured up a vision of the city as it might have been experienced in his own day.
This was a modern metropolis in which contemporary buildings and old ruins coexisted and in which the discerning observer could find traces of different histories. In this city, further remnants lay undetected beneath the surface, antiquities that might one day be brought to the surface again and restored. But Freud then summoned up a second kind of Rome. “Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.”1 In this city, buildings of various periods would all be standing intact, some of them in the same place, somehow cohabitating without the displacement of any older structures. “In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes.”2 All these palaces, temples, and monuments would be visible to an observer, who “would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.”3No sooner did Freud offer up the metaphor of Rome as a psychical entity than he began to back away from it. This Rome was a fantasy, Freud said, and depended on a scenario that was “unimaginable and even absurd”; such a city did not exist, and it was impossible to represent it, at least in spatial terms.4 Besides, comparing the
1 Civilization and Its Discontents, in Freud 1953-1974, vol.
21, 70.2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
Phiroze Vasunia, Memories of Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly,
Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0015. human mind to a city, to any urban settlement and not just the “Eternal City,” was not feasible, and the friable quality of a city would make it unsuitable for a comparison of the kind undertaken by the analyst. Freud went on to disavow the analogy between Rome and the mind, although he also stated “the fact that it is the rule rather than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life.”[1271]
Readers have wondered why Freud included this description of Rome if he was going to deny its validity for the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. Various explanations have been put forward, including one by Ellen Oliensis, who suggests that Freud's text shows how large-scale feelings of desire and aggression lie behind imperial expansion. For Freud, the “ego-feeling of maturity” coexists with the survival of an infantile ego-feeling, which is “a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”[1272] This infantile ego-feeling, Freud suggests, lies behind the “oceanic feeling” to which he refers in Civilization and Its Discontents. In presenting to his readers the “archaeologist's dream (or nightmare) of total preservation” in his second description of Rome, Freud is also providing an example of the mature adult's desire to reconnect to that oceanic feeling.[1273] The psychoanalyst's Rome “embodies the imperious desire to reabsorb the world the infant had perforce to let go.”[1274] As Oliensis puts it, “the oceanic feeling resurfaces as the sensation of Roman imperialism,”[1275] and Freud's city stands for an aggressive fantasy of complete possession, in time and space.
It is this “imperial problematic,” so well explored by Latin poets such as Virgil, “that Freud could not bring himself quite to write out of his Aeneid” namely, Civilization and Its Discontents.[1276]One way of understanding Freud's use of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents is to read it as an acknowledgment of the difficulties involved in recalling the past and in finding ways of comprehending it satisfactorily. But Freud's peculiar deployment of Rome suggests that more is at issue than infantile memory. Many if not most of Freud's references to Roman buildings refer to the period of ancient Rome's rise to world historical importance and to the era when it becomes established as the imperial capital par excellence. Approached from this perspective, Freud's disavowal implies that memories of empire are not easy to explore, that they frustrate the best efforts to represent them, and that metaphors or rhetorical figures are unlikely to provide adequate models for exploring the imperial past. Neither the initial example of contemporary Rome nor the turbo-charged image of permanence that he constructs is sufficient for the purpose of working through what an imperial experience felt like in the past and what it might mean for the present and the future. Memories of empire are not (like) cities, or palimpsests, or chronotopic structures that can be easily accessed and analyzed. Such memories can be impactful but also complex and indirect, and their recollection is never pure and simple but frequently uncertain, fallible, contested, and difficult.
An additional implication of Freud's work is that “memories” can be construed expansively, so that Freud's description of Rome can itself count as a “memory” of the city. Broadening out the term in this fashion is not inconsistent with historiographical developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when historians have become familiar with concepts such as collective memory, social memory, and historical memory and have explored the significance of “places of memory.” Freud himself provided an example of what has subsequently been called “mnemohistory” in Moses and Monotheism, a book which tries to show how the effects of historical trauma have lingered among the Jewish people for centuries.
Let us, therefore, take the expression “memories of empire” in a very broad sense. Memories of empire are individual and collective; they seep into narratives that are historical and fictional, pictorial and verbal; they can be found a generation after the event, or a millennium. Events may be forgotten or repressed, and an individual or a group may feel a compulsion to act out or work through what has been forgotten; at times, what is forgotten may be displaced or transformed into narratives that bear little correspondence to the past. For these reasons, any discussion of memories of empire remains challenging and tentative.The expression “memories of empire” is intelligible in at least two ways. In the sense that I have been using it, the expression can denote the memories that people or groups have of empires in the past. My parents' or grandparents' reminiscences about India during the period of British rule fall into this category, as do recollections by any number of others who were alive during the Raj. A Kenyan waiter in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father remembers “that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built.”[1277] His memory of empire is framed by the realization that, as in colonial days, small elites control a disproportionate share of the country's resources and that inequalities of wealth persist. Numerous studies attest to the pride, melancholia, nostalgia, guilt, and shame felt by the French or the British after the loss of their colonies in the twentieth century; such feelings were prompted, in part, by recollections of empires that once existed. National traditions, ceremonies, and archives are frequently built around such memories of the imperial past.[1278]
But construe the genitive in a subjective rather than an objective sense and you grasp a different implication of the term “memories of empire,” and in this meaning, empire itself is said to have memories.
What memories does empire have? Empire has a memory of empire. To illustrate the matter in simple terms, one might point out that Samudragupta's Allahabad pillar inscription, “a foundational document of the self-expression of imperial polity in the Sanskrit cosmopolis,” was engraved on a pillar used by Ashoka to display two of his edicts.[1279] The pillar was then exploited, after some centuries, by the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir and has prompted observers to proclaim that it “embodies two millennia of Indian political charisma”[1280] (see further Bang, vol. 2, part I). Or one might deploy another chain of linked instances and say that the French and British empires looked back to the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire recalled Alexander the Great, and Alexander himself sought to emulate the kings of Persia. But so bald a sequence barely does justice to the phenomenon, which needs to be analyzed, conceptually and in detail, and to which we can merely allude here. At any rate, both senses of the term “memories of empire” will be relevant as we explore its associations in this chapter.
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