Freud's Mexican Antiquities - Psychoanalysis and Human Sacrifice

Rube Gallo w Antiquities

Lecture by Rubén Gallo (Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis)

in english language

December 2, 2009, 7 p.m., Sigmund Freud Museum

Freud was an avid collector and over his life he acquired over 2,000 antiquities from around the world. In recent years the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pieces in the collection have received much scholarly attention and have led to exhibitions and publications. But the collection also includes a handful of pieces from Latin America: a Peruvian Moche figure and two objects from pre-Columbian Mexico – one of which forms part of the permanent collection at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. What do these objects tell us about Freud as collector of world cultures? How do they relate to the psychoanalytic theory of the development of civilization? What is their relation to the Mediterranean objects that make up the bulk of the collection? What do they tell us about the politics of collecting? Before his death in 2003, Edward Said published a little book, Freud and the non-European, on the question of how the Freudian worldview could account for non-European cultures. Following this line of thought, Rubén Gallo will use Freud’s Mexican antiquities as a point of departure to explore the psychoanalytic view of pre-Columbian Mexico – a culture that fascinated scholars of Freud’s generation, from Walter Benjamin to Georges Bataille.  

Rubén Gallo, Director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, is the 2009 Freud-Fulbright Scholar of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Freud’s Mexico: into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (forthcoming from the MIT Press), a study of Freud’s relation to Mexico. His other publications in English include Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT, Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, 2005), New Tendencies in Mexican Art (Palgrave, 2004), and The Mexico City Reader (2004), which has been translated into French and Spanish.


On Freud’s Mexico:…a very different picture of Freud emerges from this book: a Freud who spoke Spanish, collected Mexican antiquities and Mexican books, had Mexican dreams, and corresponded with his Mexican disciples. Freud’s Mexico will lead readers into the wilds of psychoanalysis.

In Cooperation with the Fulbright Commission und Instituto Cervantes Viena

 

 

 

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