Composite Formations: Freud's Picture of Rome and the Phantasy of 'Self Analysis'

This lecture deals with Freud's well-known use (in Civilization and Its Discontents of 1930) of the archaeology of the city of Rome as an analogy for the history of the human psyche. What did the analogy allow Freud to envision, and what did it obscure? How was it related to other visual models and spatial metaphors Freud used to characterize the procedures of psychoanalysis? Why did Freud use the archaeology of Rome, specifically, in his analogy? How did existing visualizations of Rome--maps, plans, prints, photographs, etc.--affect his conceptualization of the analogy? What would an archaeology of psychic space--as opposed to the real space of a city--look like?