Traumaphilia=Ruinophilia
2021
Today, 117 years later, I, like Freud, put on my best shirt and walked into the Acropolis of Athens. Aware of my incoming visit to Greece and also aware of Freud being such an archaeology enthusiast, I wondered if I could have found any Freudian psychoanalytic link with the beautiful Athenian temples. My curiosity has been rewarded by an anecdote, an episode in Freud’s life well recounted in the fascinating essay “Unreal City: Freud on the Acropolis”, in which it is revealed the visit, with his brother Alexander, to the Acropolis. The event, recounted thirty-six years later in a sort of open letter to the friend Romain Rolland unfolds the uncanny and (later) haunting experience that the journey was, as in an unconscious awareness, soaked with an “Oedipal success”. The intimate reflections are in the last words of the letter, revealing that at the time, being there in Athens and being able to discern the value of those millennial ruins was a success over a pitiful, uneducated father to whom so little those stones could say — already the mere fact of being present in the Acropolis, confirming its existence, was a victory over the mediocre father. The thought expanded so broadly in Freud’s mind that the sense of pity induced prevented him from enjoying his tour. But, unlike Freud, I enjoyed my visit. It brought me a lot to think about psychoanalysis, the procedures of its clinic and how these historical sites are the perfect metaphor for them. Freud has often been paralleled as an archaeologist of the mind — as the analyst who digs into the individual psyche, collecting and classifying intimate historical finds. The analyst slowly digs into the mind-ground, exploring each stratum, level by level, to bring back to light forgotten ancient objects. What is delivered to the exterior are the patient’s artefact-traumas, broken and fragmented into a myriad of pieces that do not hold sense in their individuality. Only once they are collected and joined together can they commence to whisper — unfolding their shapes and history. The missing fragments that cannot be found are reconstructed with the help of the archaeologist-analyst to complete the lines. The trauma-structure is always restored, never destroyed. The final construction always resurfaces to be admired to be understood. It is erected as an original neo-monument to make sense of the space in which it is founded. No trauma can be forgotten, and no trauma can be eternally buried. There will always be an event that will make the trauma re-emerge — it does not matter how much time has passed, it will happen, and the trigger will go off. Likewise, the nameless Iraqi city resurfaced after 3400 years from the bottom of the sea. A place now under scrutiny, ready to unravel pieces of an obliterated history; a discovery, an encounter made possible by the “triggering trauma”, the Geotrauma.