Freud Antiquities Help Interpret the Interpreter : Art: A display at UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery comes from the Freud Museum in London, his former study.

It’s easy to forget that Sigmund Freud, long so loomingly familiar as the father of psychoanalysis, was dismissed and ostracized by colleagues when he began to expound his theories.

But the famous doctor himself wrote that his early studies, radical at the time, caused him to be “despised and universally shunned,” meeting resistance impounded by the building anti-Semitism that later forced his family to flee a Nazi invasion of Vienna.

In this isolation, Freud needed an audience. He created one by crowding his work space with ancient artifacts, an array of humans and animal sculptures he collected himself, according to Lynn Gamwell, keynote speaker Saturday at a UC Irvine symposium on an exhibit she co-organized to showcase the collection.

From 1896 to 1939, Freud amassed some 2,000 Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Near Eastern and Asian antiquities. Seeing a link between his profession and his avocation, he likened the process of clearing away layers of psychological material to “excavating a buried city.”

Filling cabinets and cramming shelves, the seminal psychiatrist placed his favorite acquisitions on his desk, arranging the delicate, symbolic figures to face him like a loyal orchestra section of ancient gods and goddesses, great thinkers and scholars.

“I think of him returning to his desk and writing not for his immediate peers in Vienna . . . but for larger history,” said Gamwell, who accompanied her lecture with slides of artworks from the 65-piece traveling exhibition, “The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments From a Buried Past.” At UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Dec. 13, the display comes from the Freud Museum in London, Freud’s former study.

For front row center, Freud chose his most cherished talisman, a 4-inch-tall Roman figure of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. Noting that Freud wrote very little about specific items he collected, Gamwell nonetheless said it was her “humble speculation” that he thought of his own intelligence and courage in relation to the piece, which dates from the 1st or 2nd Century AD.

In addition, the figure clearly alludes to Freud’s way of defining woman by relating her to man--that is, without a phallus.

“This Athena is lacking her spear, and we all know what that means,” said Gamwell, director of the University Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Just beyond the small bronze, Freud placed a 19th-Century Chinese “table screen” of wood and jade thought to be conducive to meditation and to encourage scholars to delve into deep contemplation. What he saw in this object was the relation between conscious thought and feelings or memories repressed far below the surface, Gamwell suggested.

The bronze goddess Isis suckling her infant son Horus embodies similar symbolism, Gamwell continued. Key to Egyptian religion, Isis was married to Osiris, god of the underworld.

“I think that’s revealing, for a scholar whose interest was in our psychological underworld,” she said.

In his squat, early Egyptian marble Baboon of Thoth, the deity of all things intellectual, Freud no doubt saw an allusion to the influence of instinct on intellectual achievement, another concept he pursued, Gamwell said.

But the powerful animal also created hieroglyphics, and probably recalls Freud’s interest in language and the related interpretation of dreams. The Egyptian language began as hieroglyphics, or a series of pictures, then evolved into something more abstract.

“This had a parallel with the interpretation of dreams,” Gamwell said. “First we see the dream--it’s pictorial--then we verbalize it.” Continuing, she quoted Freud when he wrote that psychiatrists might be better at “understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about he development of language.”

Conflicting dualities within the personality, another Freudian concept, are recalled in a 3rd-Century B.C. Etruscan balsamarium, a bronze, head-shaped incense burner bearing the face of both a male and female, Gamwell said.

“This reminds us first of his theory of the basic bisexuality” of all human beings, as well as other dualisms, such as pain versus pleasure, or libido versus aggression.”

Moving into more recent research on Freud’s collection, Gamwell discussed her attempts to define how his Judaism related to or influenced his work and how information about that could be gleaned from his antiquities--a previously uncharted area of discovery.

On one hand, Freud was an atheist who shunned Jewish religious ritual. But on the other, he was culturally Jewish, the lecturer said. And while cautioning against “over-interpreting the interpreter,” she noted that included in his collection are unmistakable references to Judaism and its traditional practices, such as a menorah and two cups used for a seder or other ceremony.

There’s no proof that Freud used these objects, she said, but “there’s no question about it, these things were there, right at the birthplace of psychoanalysis.”

“The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past,” 65 Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Near Eastern and Asian antiquities and artifacts from the collection of Sigmund Freud, continues at UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Dec. 13. Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. (714) 856-6610.