sigmund freud's collection an archaeology of the mind

Phallus (winged)
Roman
bronze, 4.8 x 3.5 cm.
LDFRD 4680
Collection Freud Museum London
Phallus (double)
Roman
bronze, 4.8 x 8.0 cm
LDFRD 4682
Collection Freud Museum London
Phallus (double)
Roman
bronze, 7.0 x 7.0 cm
LDFRD 4684
Collection Freud Museum London
Freud collected around twenty phalluses, mostly Roman but also
Egyptian, Etruscan and Japanese. If he liked an item, he bought as
many good examples as possible. Though Freud believed that the
Roman god Priapus ‘stood for permanent erection, a wish fulfi lment
representing the opposite of psychological impotence’, the god also
signifi ed good luck. 1 To the Romans, Priapus was a protective fertility
god and they placed statues of him in their gardens, as well as in their
fi elds as scarecrows.
The original role of these little phalluses was not so much erotic
pleasure but portable talismans that were sewn into clothes or
carried, and that offered magical protection from evil. As a symbol
of good fortune and male power, the phallus had been worshipped
since Neolithic times. Freud was critical of conservative attitudes that
designated the genitals as ‘objects of shame ... and even disgust’
while in earlier civilisations ‘they were the pride and hope of living
beings; they were worshipped as gods.’ It made him refl ect that in ‘the
course of cultural development so much of the divine and sacred was
ultimately extracted from sexuality that the exhausted remnant fell into
contempt.’ 2
1. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887-1904, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 1985, p.308.
2. Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’, (1910), S.E., vol.XI,
p. 97.
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