Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)
ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection
His preference for sculpture may have resulted from the fact that Freud began collecting art objects in a rather difficult period of his life: besides the climate of everincreasing anti-Semitism and the loss of his father Jacob, his radical theories in the 1890s brought Freud years of professional isolation. He suffered from an unfulfilled wish for intellectual partnership that he ultimately substituted with the large "audience" of his small figurines. 86 These artefacts became an inseparable part of the cultural matrix, Freud's personal "School of Athens", from which psychoanalysis has emerged. 8, Freud explicitly favoured figurines representing various facets of ancient knowledge, wisdom and skill. For instance, a bronze ex-voto figurine of the deified Imhotep on his desk symbolised the man of wisdom, 88 another figure from the desk, a marble baboon statue of Thot invoked the god of wisdom, 89 whereas the scribe statuettes under consideration personified the Egyptian ideal of the educated man. 90 It has already been noted that Freud's inherent affection for and deep scholarly interest in ancient Egypt contrast sharply with Egypt's involvement in the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. 91 Despite the frequent allusions in his texts to the land, its gods and myths, Egypt has remained underdeveloped, especially as compared to Classical Antiquity. 92 This is even more surprising if one considers Freud's solid background knowledge of ancient Egypt which enabled him to venture into Egyptological discussions in his writings on the fields of philology, the imagery of hieroglyphic script, and the intraphysical mode of life in Egypt —not to mention his late masterpiece, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Amsterdam 1939). 93 It is of some interest from the perspective of this study that Freud published a short paper in 1925, entitled A Note upon the "Mystic Writing Pad", in which he drew an analogy between this small contrivance, known today by the name "Printator", with the operation of human perceptual apparatus. 94 At the outset, Freud investigated the different receptive capacity of a sheet of paper and of a slate upon which we used to write with a piece of chalk, and emphasised that the latter provides an unlimited receptive capacity (by wiping out the previous notes covering the surface), but cannot retain a permanent trace. Whether he may have been influenced by imperfectly preserved or half-erased inscriptions on pieces from his collection, 95 or was prompted by his interest in the effacement of inscriptions to purchase the scribe statuettes with their inscribed writing boards, we unfortunately cannot know now. Declaring the statuette in the collection forgery, finally I find it necessary to emphasise that spuriousness per se does not automatically infer depreciation. Valuing
