Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

FREUD'S CONSULTING ROOM ARCHAEOLOGY AND VICO'S

PRINCIPLES OF HUMANITY: A COMMUNICATION
Donald Phillip Verene

ABSTRACT Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Freud both claim to have discovered a 'new
science' of the human. This essay considers some intellectual connections between their two views
of man, consciousness and history. Both Vico and Freud find burial and origin to be keys to an
understanding of the psyche and culture. Although some attention has been given to a connection
between these two thinkers, this is the first time the fundamentals of their views have been explored
in philosophical terms.

In a brief statement made for the BBC near the end of his life, Freud said that through a bit
of luck he had discovered a 'new science', psychoanalysis, that is part of psychology. Two
centuries earlier, the Neapolitan thinker, Giambattista Vico, claimed to have discovered a
new science of humanity which he published as Principles of New Science Concerning the
Common Nature of the Nations. Vico said he could not refrain from giving his work:
the invidious title of a New Science, for it was too much to defraud it unjustly of the rightful claim it
had over an argument so universal as that concerning the common nature of nations, in virtue of that
property which belongs to every science that is perfect in its idea. (Vico 1744, par1 1096; Verene
1981)

In An Autobiographical Study Freud (1925) said:

I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any
other science. This refusal found an expression in the raising of the most obstinate objections.
Psycho-analysis was constantly reproached for its incompleteness and insufficiencies; though it is
plain that a science based upon observation has no alternative but to work out its findings piecemeal
and to solve its problems step by step. (p. 58)

If we consider Freud's and Vico's views together, their respective 'new sciences', some
dimensions of both may emerge that are not evident when each is considered alone.
Freud, like Vico, can claim for his new science a universal argument. Vico claims that he
has discovered the principles of the common nature of all nations or cultures as they develop
in history. Freud (1926) claims that he has discovered the principles of the human psyche.
He says that psychoanalysis is more than a method of treatment to be swallowed up in text
books of psychiatry. He says psychoanalysis deserves a better fate:

DONALD PHILLIP VERENE PhD, LHD is Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at
Emory University, Atlanta. He has published books on Vico, Hegel and Cassirer, and has held visiting
appointments at the universities of Oxford, Toronto and Rome, and at the Folger Institute, Washington,
DC. Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322,
USA.
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 13(4), 1997
The author

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As a 'depth-psychology', a theory of the mental unconscious, it can become indispensable to all the
sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such
as art, religion and the social order. (p. 248)

A science cannot remain simply perfect in its idea for it might then exist only as an idea.
Its universal argument, as Freud says, must be worked out piecemeal, and its problems
solved step by step. Vico does this with his science of nations and Freud does this with his
science of psychoanalysis. Vico develops his account of nations through a wealth of details
of human history. Freud develops his account of the human psyche through a wealth of
details gained in the treatment of his patients.
Vico asserts three principles of humanity - religion, marriage and burial. He intends
principle in its Latin sense of principium, beginning, source, what is first in place and time,
and its sense as a general law or rule, an element. Each nation in the world of nations must
have these three institutions (cose) as its origin in order to be born. They are the necessary
conditions for the birth of any nation. Vice, understands nation (nazione) both in its root
sense of birth (natio) and in its sense of a people, a gens. Religion, marriage and burial are
not only the beginnings of any nation, they are also the elements or principles of life that are
held in common among all nations. All other institutions that develop in human culture are
made possible through the original existence and continued presence of these three principles
of humanity.
Freudian psychology is famous for its interpretations of religion and sexuality as
principles of the human psyche and human society. If we regard Vico's principle of marriage
as the basis of his own account of sexuality, there is a parallel with Vico's first two principles
of humanity. Freud and Vico are different thinkers, and I shall not attempt in this short paper
to discuss their respective views of religion and sexuality. They are both great scientists of
the human, but I shall not attempt here to explore what each fully means by his `science'.
Very little exists on the connections between Freud and Vico, and my remarks are intended
only as a beginning (Mazlish 1966; Grassi 1981).
What of Vico's third principle: burial? Does Freud have a principle of burial? Freud's (
1907) use of burial as a symbol of repression is found in his essay on `Delusions and dreams
in Jensen's Gradiva'. Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, which appeared in 1903, is a fictional story
of a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who discovers in Rome, in a museum of
antiquities, a relief of a girl in a flowing robe, stepping along with a charming gait. Hanold
becomes fascinated with the figure and the depicted motion of her gait. He names her `
Gradiva' and dreams of her, in his dream placing her in Pompeii. He travels to Pompeii in the
spring and pursues his delusion of actually meeting her. He meets an embodiment of her in a
German girl who appears in his delusion and tells him her name is 'Zo' - Greek for life. The
story is complicated, and Freud (1900) analyses it according to his principles in The
Interpretation of Dreams (SE Vol. 4, p. 97, n. 1; SE Vol. 5, p. 372n). There is a relief of `
Gradiva' among Freud's collection of antiquities, and the story contains one of his favourite
images: Pompeii. Freud was fascinated by the historical fate of Pompeii, with the analogy
between its burial and subsequent excavation and the burial of mental events by repression
and their excavation by analysis (Freud 1907, pp. 4-5).
We learn further in the story that Hanold had had a friendship during his childhood with
a little girl named Zoe Bertgang, that he had forgotten. Freud points out that we learn from
Hanold, after he is freed from his delusion, that `Gradiva' is a good translation of 'Bertgang', `
which means something like "someone who steps along

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501

brilliantly or splendidly"' (1907, p. 51). Freud says Hanold transported her to Pompeii
because in Hanold's science of archaeology no better analogy could be found for his state of
becoming aware of his childhood memories. Freud concludes that
once he had made his own childhood coincide with the classical past (which it was so easy for him to
do), there was a perfect similarity between the burial of Pompeii - the disappearance of the past
combined with its preservation - and repression, of which he possessed a knowledge through what
might be described as `endopsychic' perception. (1907, p. 51; see also pp. 84-5)

At an earlier point in his interpretation, Freud says:

There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made
inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it
could emerge once more through the work of spades. (1907, p. 40)

Freud finds extraordinarily valuable Jensen's perception of a similarity `between a

particular mental process in the individual and an isolated historical event in the history of
mankind' (p. 40). In the case history of the `Rat Man', Freud is explaining to his patient `the
psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that
everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious
was relatively unchangeable'. Freud reports:
I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact,
I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of
Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up. (1909, p. 176; see also 1907, p. 40n)

Freud compared his addiction to the prehistoric and archaeology with his addiction to
cigars (Gay 1988). His consulting room and study in Vienna were full of small statuary from
ancient Western and Oriental cultures. This arrangement was preserved, with some
modification, in the house in London at Maresfield Gardens, where he spent the last year of
his life, which can be seen today by visiting the house, now the Freud Museum. Freud's
treatment of his patients and his own writing went on within the forest of these sculptures Egyptian, Etruscan, Assyrian, Roman figures, Buddhas, etc. The figures, collected by Freud
mostly by purchase from dealers, covered every surface. Freud listened to his patients while
sitting in a green tub chair at the end of the famous couch, which was itself piled high with
pillows and covered with a Persian rug; another Oriental rug hung on the wall beside the
couch.
The couch presents the patient with a scene or tableau, quite opposite to the spare
Victorian consulting couch imagined by most who have not seen the actual object or a good
photograph of it. Freud, sitting in the tub chair at the end of the couch, his back to the wall,
could look at his antiquities while listening to his patient, and occasionally he employed one
of these items as part of an explanation in a fashion similar to his image of Pompeii,
mentioned above. In the Vienna house Freud had a side view of a row of these statues. In the
London house he was looking at the backs of such that were arranged along the front edge of
his desk. When he was working at his desk the statues were facing him, and he would pick
one up from time to time.
To understand a thinker it is very helpful to be able to see and enter into the place where
the thoughts were formed. While he saw patients and while he thought and wrote, Freud was
at all times looking at things that had been buried or were connected to burial. The things he
sat among were dug up from archaeological sites; some had themselves been part of burials,
such as the fragment of a lid of a Roman sarcophagus,

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or were brought into the West having been figuratively buried in cultures radically other than
the West - the Buddhas and objects from the Orient. These are artefacts of archaic mentality
that exists in cultures ordered by myths. They are evidences of what Vico would call the
childhood of the human race. They are keys to memory both cultural and perhaps individual.
Vico has left us in his autobiography a portrait of where he worked in his description of
how he prepared his concourse lecture for his competition for the 'morning chair' of law at the
University of Naples. He says he prepared the lecture, working until five o'clock in the
morning, amid the 'conversation of his friends and the cries of his children, as his custom
was, whether reading, writing, or thinking' (Vico 1725-28, p. 163; Verene 1991, p. 19). In
effect, Vico worked in his kitchen amid his family and friends, which, as Aristotle shows in
the Politics, is the basic unit of civic life.
Descartes, against whom Vico set himself off, worked sitting alone in his famous stoveheated room, his pole, making his discovery of the cogito ergo sum in the abstraction of his
thought; at least, this is the tableau of himself as thinker that he offers in the Discours. Vico
is the thinker situated in the civic, in the polis, like that in which Socrates spoke. Vico is the
modern Socrates, situated in the new polis, Neapolis (Naples). Vico's principles of humanity
of religion, marriage and burial make possible the civic life in which he thinks his thoughts.
Vico with his children and his emphasis on the family is the modern family man, as in a
sense is Freud.
There is no evidence that Freud read Vico or had any knowledge of his writings. He
could have read Vico in the uninspired nineteenth-century German translation by W.E.
Weber of the Scienza nuova and Vico's autobiography. Vico's ideas were known in German
thought since Herder and Goethe, but they were not well known, and Vico remained an
obscure figure in German thought, as he did generally in European thought. At his death in
1744 Vico's New Science was known among scholars in Italy, but very little in Northern
Europe. It was 'discovered' by Michelet in the nineteenth century, who merged Vico's views
with his own conception of history, and by Croce in the twentieth century, who wished to
show Vico to be a precursor of Hegel and his own form of philosophical idealism.
In our time there is world-wide scholarly attention paid to Vico, and his ideas have been
analysed in relation to many fields of the humanities and human sciences (M.B. Verene
1994). Many readers have first encountered Vico through James Joyce, who used the New
Science as the basis of Finnegans Wake in the way he used Homer's Odyssey as the basis of
Ulysses. Joyce told Padraic Colum that he used Vico's cycles 'as a trellis' (Verene 1987, p.
225).
Vico's cycles are the basis of his conception of history. Vico is commonly regarded as the
founder of the philosophy of history. He regards the life of each nation as passing through
corso and ricorso. The course of the nation moves from an age of gods (in which all of
human experience is ordered in terms of gods), to an age of heroes (in which all of human
society and types of human character are understood in terms of heroes), to an age of humans
(in which all thought becomes abstract and rational and society is based on written law). As
the third age progresses the vitality of society is lost and civilization disintegrates. From its
remains the nation rises up again in a recourse, and the pattern of the three ages is repeated.
Applied to the history of the West, Vico regards the age of gods and the age of heroes to have
occurred before Homer and to be summarized in his poems. The age of humans ends with the
fall of the classical culture, and humans return to the forest.

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Analogous to the original age of gods there is a new age of religion, that passes into the
age of heroes, the knights and culture of the high Middle Ages, that is summarized in Dante's
Divine Comedy. Dante is called by Vico the `Tuscan Homer'. This is followed by the modern
age of reason and science in which Vico and we find ourselves. Vico sees the life of any
nation as undergoing a pattern of rise, maturity and fall. As Isaiah Berlin (1976) has shown,
Vico's view of history is anti-Enlightenment, that is, it does not view history as a story of
progress. The life of any nation repeats in its fundamental aspects the life of every other
nation, in the way the life of any individual within a species repeats in its basic development
the life of every other member of the species. Voltaire, not Vico, is the founder of the
Enlightenment conception of history, in which some ages are regarded as progressive and
illuminated while others are of no importance.
Vico is also the founder of the philosophy of mythology. Ernst Cassirer, the German
philosopher of culture, called Vico the 'real discoverer of the myth' (der eigenliche Entdecker
des Mythos) (Cassirer 1950, p. 296). Vico anticipates thinkers who regard myth as the
original form of human experience and mentality, such as Lvi-Strauss in anthropology,
Mircea Eliade in history of religion, and Cassirer in his `philosophy of symbolic forms'. For
Vico the first humans form their world, not through intellectual concepts, but through `
imaginative universals' (universali fantastici). The first truths and the first institutions of the
human world are formed through the power of fantasia. Fantasia might best be translated as '
the making imagination'.
Vico plays on the ancient notion of the poeta as both a composer of poems and a maker.
The poeta has the power to order the world in terms of the images of gods and heroes. The
formations and songs of the poeta are the wisdom that became the guides to life of both the
individual and the society. There is an original 'poetic wisdom' (sapienza poetica) contained
in the myths of a culture and the universal mythic themes of all cultures. Vico calls this a '
common mental language' (lingua commune mentale) or sensus communis that underlies all
human acts of thought and production.
Vico conveys this by portraying an original science of humanity combining themes from
both the Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. According to Vico's modification of
biblical mythology, after the universal flood the world dries out over two centuries. The
offspring of the sons of Noah grow to the size of giants, bestioni, who roam without purpose
or place across the great forests of the earth. They are fearless and without shame. There are
no families, no conception of parentage. As the world dries out they experience, without
warning, a new phenomenon - thunder and lightning. For the first time they experience fear
and run into caves and form marriages in order to fornicate out of the sight of the sky. Thus
they also experience shame. They perceive the thunder as Jove whose body is the grumbling
sky (Jupiter tonans).
Jove is the first name, which they formed first as a kind of outcry that imitates the noise
of thunder. Once one thing can be named all can be named, and the world is full of gods. To
name one thing in experience requires the full power of human symbolism to be at the
disposal of the mind. Thus this power can be applied to all other things in the world. The
most responsive among the bestioni construct altars to take the auspices of Jove, and create
sacrifices. They found families and claim property. Clearings made in the great forests
become the sites of cities. Those who did not apprehend the thunder through the name, Jove,
remain feral; they become plebeians and clients under the protection of the families.
Burial becomes a way of claiming property, of creating place and establishing the

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lineage of families. The families and their ancestors are under the protection of the gods, who
are later connected with a system of heroes who embody in their character and actions the
virtues necessary to the evolution of social order. Vico says every nation has its Jove,
although known by different names. All nations have similar beginnings in religion, marriage
and burial.
In the course of a nation its origins are forgotten. The social order formed through the
power of fantasia and custom is replaced by the rational orders of `intelligible universals' (
universali intelligibili) and nations' customs by the abstraction of written laws. As the poetic
thought of the origin is repressed and put off to the side in favour of a `Cartesian' rationality
and technical order of life, the nation disintegrates into a secular third age. Rationality
unconnected to the fantasia becomes an 'ultimate civil disease' from which the nation cannot
recover. In Freudian terms we could say that the origin and its powers are repressed and
forgotten to the extent that the nation can no longer balance the conditions of its life, and it
disintegrates through its obsession with ratiocination.
As Vico's third principle of humanity, burial, establishes place (the place where one's
ancestors are buried), it founds time in that there is a chronology of generations; the living
connect themselves with the past through the burial ground. Burial is the basis of memory
and also the basis of the family, because the family understands its reality in terms of what
has gone before in its ancestors and in relation to its possibilities of continuance in the future.
For Freud, burial is a principle of the psyche in which things are repressed and preserved.
Through analysis these things can be brought to light in a process analogous to archaeology.
Freud, sitting in his tub chair in his consulting room, or at his desk, is continually reminded
that there is an origin of things to be dug up, just as the antique figures have been dug up
from the origins of the nations in which they were made. The key is to make memory work to
recollect what is buried in the psyche and see it for what it is. The antiquities continually
represent this problem, for they require us to attempt to supply the context that allows their
memory to come to light. I doubt that we can overestimate the value that these constant
reminders of the archaic had for Freud in his work.
Vico's corso of the life of a nation involves the discovery of the origin in the myth. Vico
allows us to grasp the present by thinking our way back to the first moment of humanity in
the Jove experience, the scene in which something is first made into a meaning by the mind,
the childhood of the human race. The three ages of the corso, in Freudian terms, are a process
of repression because the myth and its accompanying power of fantasia are repressed as the
nation develops a rational life, until all connection of fantasia and truth is dismissed and
rational intelligibility becomes the standard of all life and society. As the interpreter of this
process of rational repression, Vico attempts to reinstate cultural memory to recover what is
buried in the transformation of a nation into its third age. In so doing Vico does not offer a
way to reverse or cure history, but he offers those who can participate in his analysis a way to
live within the third age, that is, modernity.
Analogous to Freud's reminders of Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology, for
Vico, was Naples itself, which has been built and rebuilt in layer upon layer. Naples is like a
palimpsest in which what has gone before and erased (buried) can always be seen in what
makes up its present form. Naples was Vico's constant reminder of memory and of origin that the present truly has a past.

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Vico in his new science of nations and Freud in his new science of psychoanalysis, each
confront the principal flaw of modernity: the loss of memory and the dismissal of the
imagination as access to the truth of the human. The world of modernity would have us
believe only in the present and believe that the causes of all events personal and social are
intelligible in terms of the logical understanding of the present. Freud and Vico show what
can be accomplished when we refuse to accept this and insist that there is a genuine
archaeology of the human being and of human culture.
Note
1. Par. refers to paragraph number, a standard form of citation for this work.
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