Digging with Freud: From Hysteria to the Birth of a New Philology

Feminist and postcolonial studies have often criticized Freudian psychoanalysis for staging the analysis of the hysterical, female patient through the metaphor of conquering terra incognita. Freud, in these perspectives, undermines the credibility of her speech by characterizing it as "enigmatic, ungrammatical, disjointed, fragmented and polylingual." Freud also has been often criticized for employing scientific positivism, whose underlying assumption is that the analyst knows better than the woman/analysand. In recent years, however, the return to Freud has engaged new feminist and postcolonial readings which interpret his text against its historical constraints. Thus, Freud's Eurocentric worldview appears to be more fragile and less homogeneous as we revisit it today. Moreover, the feminine figure of terra incognita triggers defensive (hysterical) responses from its various explorers: the psychoanalyst, the archeologist and the philologist. This essay offers a reading of Freud's metaphor of archeology. It uncovers symptoms of fragility and ambivalence underlying the scientific efforts to preserve the distinction between the objective analyst and the hysterical patient, as well as the distinction between modernity and antiquity so central to the disciplines of archeology and philology.