BROWSE Columns
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Thirty-five antique figures stand in a semicircle on Freud’s desk.
There in the back row, the Head of Osiris, one of the oldest and largest, rests on a pillar. From his white crown of the south, the Uraeus snake winds downwards and pauses, her head poised above the centre of his brow. Osiris died, returned to life and through his powers of transcendence created the afterlife. Next to him sits his sister-wife Isis, their son Horus on her lap. Two sturdy horns support a solar disc above her head. She spoke magic words that resurrected Osiris from the dead. Amun-Re juts out further to the right with his double feather crown. He is the ‘breath of life for all things’ and reigns over all creation. Elongating their heads, the tall crowns of the gods connect them to the realm of the sky and the stars. Next to Amun-Re the Memphitic god Ptah stands pensively. He forms thoughts with his heart and speaks them aloud. It is thus he creates the world, the cosmos and the universe. A Taoist sage lights up the row of sublime Egyptian countenances with his happy smile. A swelling on his forehead reveals him as an immortal.
The depth of time stretches out behind the gods.
The Egyptians believed the gods could return to a figure at any time. Or to a word.
Freud’s desk was not far from the couch for his patients. Sometimes he picked up one of his figures and placed it in his patient’s hand. Perhaps to lend his words more weight. As an instrument for excavation. As a mythical mirror. After his patients had left, he returned to the desk with his gods.
Athene is smaller, more fragile, but central. There are barely any other Greek deities by her side. Sprung from the head of Zeus fully formed and armoured, she offers mankind wisdom and courage in combat. She is the guardian goddess of Odysseus and his loyal companion.
Behind Athene, a small sage of white-green jade floats within the tendril-shaped carving of a Chinese table screen. The screen holds the outside world at bay and the sage, his gaze wandering towards the garden, guides the observer into the spiritual realm.
The Hindu god Vishnu has joined the crowd in the back left. Reality arises from his dreams. Next to him stand three stately Chinese ladies- in-waiting, one a dancer with long silken sleeves. At the other end of gender, an Etruscan warrior with a sweeping helmet plume — but no hands, spear, or left foot — and a centaur on a platform, heaving a slab of stone atop its head.
Keys to concealed chambers. Friends through time and timelessness. Companions in contemplation. How reverent they are — seated in a semicircle as if on the crescent moon, dangling their legs into space.
They nod to me.
*
I was born on the day of capitulation and liberation, twenty-eight years after the end of the war. I could only explain the dead of the land to myself with words. Words were grafted onto me like body parts, once shot off and now reattached. The phantom pains persisted. I started to suspect I had only been given prosthetics.
The words themselves were not to be found. A catastrophe had taken place. A world was lost. Like the figures of the gods, the words were buried as grave goods. The dead took the words with them. Their return was not to be expected.
*
Freud spent his life searching for them. He found them on his travels, in local antique dealers, or they were given to him as gifts.
The Etruscan warrior had been with him since his first trip to Italy in 1897. He probably stumbled upon the Head of Osiris — the oldest figure in the collection, dating from the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt — while on holiday in Salzburg in 1898. At Tiffany’s in New York in 1909 he found his bust of Buddha. He positioned it on a shelf directly behind his head when sitting in the armchair next to patients. Sándor Ferenczi acquired two pairs of dragons for him from a backstreet treasure hunter at Duna Pentele in Hungary. In one pair the dragons turn towards each other, in the other they strive apart, like two quarrelling but inseparable powers. The Indian Psychoanalytic Society sent him the white Vishnu in 1931. He bought his Isis in 1935 from the Viennese antique dealer Robert Lustig. Salvaging it from the forgotten wing of a junk shop, Lustig had bought it for the price of scrap metal.
Freud was reluctant to spend time away from his gods and took some of them with him to Berchtesgaden or Grinzing over the summer, because his words flowed more easily in their presence. As the next war drew near he was in danger of losing them again.
*
“Finis Austriae”, Freud noted in his Chronik on 11 March 1938. It was the day of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany. Finis Freud? Although his friends and confidants urged him to flee, Freud was reluctant to turn to life once more. The inventor of the talking cure was 81 years old and, for fifteen years, had been suffering from a cancerous ulcer in his mouth. He endured more than thirty surgeries and part of his right jawbone, gums and tongue mucosa had been removed in 1923. The prosthetic jaw later prepared for him, whose insertion and removal required another’s help, inhibited his speech for the rest of his life. In the final months of his life he was barely able to say a word.
In view of the wave of humiliations and murders confronting Austrian Jews, his daughter Anna made a suggestion: would it not be better to take our own lives in Vienna? On 15th March SA troops searched the office of the International Psychoanalytic publishing house and the Freuds’ home. Martha obligingly opened the safe for the gentlemen to help themselves to the treasures. On 22nd March Anna was arrested by the Gestapo. Fear for his daughter shook Freud awake. He wrote to his son Ernst that he had two aims in life, to unite his family in safety and “to die in freedom.” He wrote the last phrase in English.
*
Freud managed to keep his sculptures safe at this moment of death. Marie Bonaparte smuggled his favourite, the Pallas Athene of wisdom, knowing and wilfulness, to Paris, where she awaited his arrival on 5th June 1938. On the same evening she accompanied him on the night ferry to London. The other figures reached him in his house in Maresfield Gardens shortly after he moved in on 27th September. Hans Demel, director of the Egyptian Oriental collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, intentionally undervalued the collection so that the Nazis would let the gods leave.
“... we left proud and rich under the protection of Athene!” And after many years are heading back to Ithaca.
His housekeeper Paula Fichtl, who had always carefully dusted the gods on his desk, organised them from memory in the same arrangement as they had stood in Vienna.
*
Vishnu’s eyes are closed. He is, who is all and is in all. Centre and pillar of the universe.
He sits on a coiled cobra. Its five heads float like protective hands above his crown. Curled up at first in the torso, the power of man unfurls like a snake rearing up along the spine.
*
In 1933 the American poet H. D. travelled to Vienna to go into analysis with Freud. The trauma of the First World War, she writes in her memoir, had effected a ‘psychic death’. Writing had become impossible. She had been waiting to meet Freud for many years and when the time comes, he appears too suddenly. She is dazzled by the treasures which so richly decorate his room. The old man had rescued them from the depths of the sea. There he stood, like Odysseus among his companions. (He was, after all, acquainted with the oceanic feeling.)
During a session he struck his hand so suddenly and violently on the pink horsehair couch that H. D. jumped up in fright. “The trouble is — I am an old man — you do not think it worth your while to love me.” For without love the words do not come back.
Old, crumbling, frayed. Penelope sits at her loom and carefully weaves the threads of his journeys into cloth. Lines on a map. Sometimes of a stretch from Aiolia to Telepylos. Sometimes of the watery depths, or of the rugged mountain ridges of the ocean floor.
*
Upon his arrival in London, Freud writes in a letter to his student and friend Max Eitington that he has difficulty comprehending the situation on an emotional level: “All of a sudden we have become popular in London.” Not only benefactors and friends, but also the bank manager and the chauffeur give the Freuds a warm welcome. Freud writes that everything seemed dreamlike and unreal. “We are smothered in flowers.”
H. D. also sent flowers — gardenias, his favourite — “to greet the return of the gods.” Referring to the arrival of his sculptures as the “return of the gods” perhaps seemed too exalted to Freud — after all, he considered religion a collective neurosis — and in his response he wrote that it should rather be considered “the return of the goods.” Yet the hermeneuticist of the slip of the tongue overlooked a third possible meaning: “the return of the good.”
*
Something in particular affected Freud very painfully, as he wrote in a letter to the Swiss analyst Raymond de Saussure: “the loss of language,” the language “in which one has lived and thought and which, despite all efforts of empathy, cannot be replaced with another.”
And yet his language was not suddenly lost. Had he forgotten that his words had always been opposed, his books burned? Like his gods, he also brought his words to England. Here they no longer had to serve as bullets or shields. Here nobody knew them. Here they could be laid to rest.
*
“A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties... it destroyed... shattered our pride...our respect... our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races... it tarnished... revealed... let loose the evil spirits within us... It made our country small again and the rest of the world once more distant and remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved...”
—Sigmund Freud (1915)
*
We call the first language mother tongue. We must separate ourselves from the mother. In a distant land we must also separate from the mother tongue. Resonances blur the straight line of time.
German was my dead mother tongue. I could not decide which part of the composite phrase died first and caused the death of the other.
The natural transition from mother into language became an escape from death, an arrival into rubble.
Perhaps the living word is always lost. Like oneness at the beginning of life, it lies submerged. Because our homeland cracks apart. Or is destroyed by war. Let us call her Troy.
*
The father saves his children, bringing them to the new place with the last of his strength. That is how he ends his life. Mine can begin there, thanks to him.
I went to America to study literature and psychoanalysis. I let the lost words rest and studied in another language. I was able to live in another language.
Psychoanalysis is a therapy of words. A healing through words. Or a healing of words themselves.
Literature deals in the beauty of words.
My practice in New Haven, Connecticut is a high-ceilinged room in the style of Belle Epoque Vienna. Large swinging doors, cornices, glass bookcases all made of dark wood. A large oriental carpet covers the parquet floor. On the dark mantelpiece stands the Isis of Ephesos, the Sphinx and a small Cupid, riding on a panther. Burgundy velvet cushions on the light couch. Three white candles burn in the fireplace.
*
*
War rages in language. Words used up like ammunition, mangled when fired. Charges fizzle, cases fall and ring out on the plaster. Silence.
War may end but murder will resound in the words long after.
Dead words are bequeathed to children. Fumes of destruction mingle with their breath. They bear dark clouds above their heads.
They suffer from what they have not experienced. They suffer what they cannot name. They wither away for they do not know their sorrow. What is alive remains sealed off.
Perhaps they go to a foreign place and take the words with them. At least there they do not have to kiss a corpse.
*
Odysseus goes out to sea. Behind him the land trembles and plummets into the abyss. It pulls the gods down with it.
He brings the words to a foreign place, where no one knows them. Where nobody pretends to know them. Where they can be what they are: lost.
V e r l o r e n.
F o r l o r e n.
F o r l o r n.
The wind howls through the empty centre of the O.
*
In our case, the flow of words is blocked. We are prone to circulatory disorders and die from heart attacks and strokes. Women develop malignant tumours in the neck region. My mother suffered a carcinoma on her thyroid gland. My aunt died from an ulcer on her tongue. A few days before her death the tumour suddenly burst open and bled out
into her mouth.
In order to prevent suffocation the jugular was cauterised. To do so a hollow needle was inserted next to her groin and pushed through the veins until reaching her neck. Liquid nitrogen froze off the bloody tissue while also attacking healthy tissue. She could not be anaesthetised for the surgery and wailed from the pain.
*
*
Freud once explained the properties of the unconscious to his patient Ernst Lanzer — who through the case study became known as ‘Rat Man’, as if rubbish and leftovers were his element. Freud said the contents of the unconscious were like his antique figures. Both were grave goods, he said, and their burial meant their preservation.
Paula dusts the gods. They had been recovered from their graves most unexpectedly. Accustomed to darkness, they draw earth mixed with air — what we call dust — towards them.
Words are remnants. We approach them like buried treasure, dig them out, hold them carefully and dust them off with a delicate brush. We trace their shapes at length. Until something shines through them again.
*
Osiris, god of life, death and transformation, appears on Freud’s desk four times. The tall head is a fragment that once belonged to a tall, hollow bronze statue. His empty eye sockets were once studded with valuable gemstones, the Atef crown adorned along both sides with the ostrich feathers of Maat. The second Osiris, with a servant in attendance, is a forgery. His head was belatedly attached to his body with a metal needle. The peak of his crown and both arms are broken off. The third Osiris lost its Uraeus, the sacred Egyptian cobra, and the fourth is missing the tip of an ostrich feather. None of the figures is whole.
According to legend, Seth, the brother of Osiris, had a wooden chest decorated for a feast, which he promised to the guest who could best fit himself inside. Osiris was the last to make an attempt and when he lay down the rabble shut and sealed off the casket, throwing it into the Nile. Isis heard the news and managed to recover the casket in Byblos. But Seth stole it from her, this time dismembering the corpse of Osiris and throwing the body parts into the Nile. In her grief and despair Isis set out in search of the remnants. She collected the scattered body parts from across the land. Then she spoke magic words which, pieced together, made the body whole. In the form of a falcon she breathed life into Osiris once more with the beating of her wings. Hovering over his body, she became pregnant with Horus.
*
*
Words are vital for the one who is dead. A golden tongue is placed in his mouth so he can account for his life before the court of Osiris. He denies committing a long series of misdeeds.
His heart is placed on the scales and weighed against the feather of Maat, symbol of truth and order. A light heart cannot lie. If it misuses the words, it becomes dull and heavy. The one who is dead must prove himself ‘true of voice’ to enter into the enlightened realm of the afterlife.
He who has wronged has a final chance — to let himself be transformed, while he speaks, by the living word.
*
The golden Egyptian serpent winds her way down Osiris’ forehead. Her fiery breath burns impurity out of the words. Those who violate the words will encounter her — she knows to deal with them formidably. Where poison was, fire shall be.
*
H. D. sees Freud one last time in London. It is his eighty-third birthday. She is not alone with the Professor. He sits silently, a little wistful and turned inwards. She does not want to disturb him. The illness is martyring his body. He longs to set out. He spends his last days with his gods in the study, looking into the garden. Only a few weeks after the start of another world war, he dies.
Lizzy Kinch is a translator and documentary producer living in London. Her translations have appeared in Chicago Review, No Man’s Land and are forthcoming in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology.
