SIGMUND FREUD THEMES

	In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud chose ancient Rome as an analogy for the unconscious. Freud represented this psychic Rome which the analyst finds not just as the city at one particular moment in its history but as all its historical periods simultaneously in one place and at a single level. In this way the human mind takes on for psychoanalysis the dimension of a hyper-archaeological space.
	"Eros" Greece, Hellenic Period, from Myrina, c.150-100 BC.
	"Now let us, by a flight of the 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 later one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. 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 ... And the observer 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."
	"Imhotep" Egypt, Late Period, 716-332 BC.