The Language of Dreams: Psychoanalysis, Egyptology, and Literary Culture

At the Egyptian town of Qift, in the 1893–94 archaeological season, the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie uncovered three colossal statues of the god Min.¹ The deity of male sexual potency, Min was most often depicted with an erect penis, though as is often the case with ancient statuary, these sculptures are incomplete. Effigies of Min were not only particularly susceptible to the loss of their penises as a result of the protrusions' vulnerability to damage (due both to their shape and their frequent manufacture from a separate piece of stone to the body), but they were often vandalized by those who found them obscene. Evidence suggests that even Petrie, a seasoned professional, may not have greeted instances of the survival of Min's erect penis with total enthusiasm. Tom Hare notes, for instance, that "Petrie found it impossible to describe [Min] adequately" in his writings; the penis is absent from his accounts, making Petrie "a party to the effacement of the phallus from the Egypt his generation wanted to see."² This was not merely a verbal oversight in Petrie's works, but a visual one. Before photographing a particular relief of the pharaoh Sesostris I running before Min for Petrie's publication of his excavation at Koptos in which the god's erect penis had survived intact, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray used a carefully positioned label to censor the unwelcome appendage (fig. 1), purportedly on Petrie's instruction.³ Elsewhere, contemporaneous photographs of depictions of Min opt for a modest composition showing the god from the waist upwards, demonstrating the prudish delicacy for which the Victorians are so often stereotyped. In contrast to this professional reticence, Petrie's personal photographic albums do not reveal an indiscriminate shyness towards the male anatomy. One of Petrie's photographs, for example, captures a closeup of the circumcised genitalia on a statue; any reluctance on his part instead appears to be limited to the penis when erect, a coyness reserved for descriptions and depictions of sexual arousal rather than of the sex organs themselves.⁴

Fig 1.

W. M. Flinders Petrie, Koptos (London: B. Quaritch, 1896), pl. 9 (detail). Source: Internet Archive.

A similar image to Petrie's partially concealed Min exists on a postcard from the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, addressed to Sigmund Freud on October 11, 1913, depicting the "interieur d'un temple" sporting a relief of Alexander the Great before the god Amun-Ra, the latter conspicuous for his erection, which has been in no way obscured or cropped from view.⁵ The image represents Ferenczi's and Freud's shared wish to visit Egypt, an unfulfilled desire for Freud about which he was so passionate that after analysis with his friend and patient, the American novelist and poet H.D., two decades later, she recorded how he "wept when I told him of the live scarabs in the yellow sand."⁶ Through the image on the postcard, this longing is explicitly aligned with archaeological fragments, but particularly ancient Egypt's sexual iconography, something which had evoked both fear and fascination in Freud via his famous maternal nightmare. On the postcard, there is no censorship: the erect penis is the focal point, occupying the central space.

As is typical of ancient Egyptian carvings, the space around the central figures in both Petrie's censored carving of Min and in Ferenczi's unabashed Amun-Ra is filled with hieroglyphic text. With the first European steps in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs customarily attributed to the French philologist Jean-François Champollion in his 1822 "Lettre à M. Dacier," by the early twentieth century the first hundred years of modern European understanding of this script approached. Despite the work of translators across the nineteenth century proving much ancient Egyptian writing to be somewhat mundane in nature, Egyptian hieroglyphs continued to be "othered": seen as magical and esoteric.⁷ In the twentieth century, this understanding of hieroglyphs as mysterious morphed into an association between them and the unconscious, representing both a kind of shared psychological inheritance...