ABSTRACT
One work by a writer in whose National Portrait Gallery effigy Freud detected ‘heroic’ features2 stimulated youthful imaginations in just the same way: The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, First Baron Lytton (1803-73). This was almost certainly the unnamed novel by Bulwer which Freud sent to Eduard Silberstein on 4 September 1874; it met Freud’s long interest in archaeology, first awakened by Heinrich Schliemann’s search for Homer’s Troy. He drew an analogy, later, between his own activity of delving into hidden strata of the mind and the archaeologist’s excavation of cities long concealed by the passage of time or natural disasters. His Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, first published in 1907, discussed a German novel that has scenes set in Pompeii, bringing Freud’s interests in psychology and archaeology fascinatingly together. It is the longest analysis of any work of literature in Freud’s writings — he never analysed an English work with comparable thoroughness.
