Psychoanalysis and the antinomies of an archaeologist: Andrea Carandini,the ruins of Rome,and the writing of history

Introductory remarks

In a trenchant intervention, the distinguished feminist scholar Joan Scott has surveyed the notably diverse and evolving complexities of relations between history and psychoanalysis. Noting that historians and psychoanalysts have different conceptions of time and causality, she goes on to argue that this very incommensurability can in and of itself be productive. Psychoanalysis, she urges, forces historians to interrogate their conventional wisdom about facts, narrative, and cause, and opens windows into ‘disturbing notions about unconscious motivation and the effects of fantasy on the making of history’ (Scott, 2012: 63). Scott is hardly alone, for the possibilities and perils of the ‘experimental entanglements’ between many disciplines, psychoanalysis and history included, is a burgeoning feature of much academic discourse in the aftermath of the linguistic and cultural turns (Alexander and Taylor, 2012; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015). Symptomatic of this has been a recent autobiographical turn in the writings of historians, and the palpable ‘desire for the past’ that this addresses and discusses has inflected theoretical and empirical practice (Aurell, 2012, 2015; Chorell, 2015). The broad purpose of this article is to consider an instance of a hitherto neglected but important aspect of such developments and initiatives. In substance what follows is a reading in close biographical detail of the life and work of a famously prolific archaeologist and historian who has undergone psychoanalysis, and who has written about the huge impact of that decade-long experience on his later life, thought, and scholarship. The aim is to employ this exploration to cast light upon some contemporary issues in the human sciences, and most importantly on ongoing debates about the quiddity and role of the subjective in interpreting and shaping historical and other types of knowledge.

Rome, Freud, and Carandini

It is well understood that Freud made recurring if often equivocal use of the emerging science of archaeology as a metaphorical analogy for the strategies and aims of psychoanalysis. Both disciplines sought to uncover the quiddities of the past, to read them into the present, and to project them into the future. Both were enmeshed in an unstable dialectic of concealment and revelation, and both strove to weave narrative sense from inferences about absences and presences. For Freud working with individuals, as for archaeologists in their readings of historic cultures, the interpretation of the past from traces and memories was an act of recuperation but also of metamorphosis. Such a procedure can and does produce narratological fictions, but these are often ‘(hi)stories’ that have a potent and persuasive validity in the present. It is similarly well understood that Freud arrived at the oracular conclusion that civilization itself was a self-consuming artefact, just like the individual mind prone to a fading away brought about from within.

Famously, Freud situated a model for this process in the ruins of ancient Rome, and there is a large and variegated literature on many aspects of this topic (e.g. Armstrong, 2005; Barker, 1996; Brunner, 2011; Jacobus, 2018; Masson, 1985; Oliensis, 2009; Phillips, 2014; Simmons, 2006; Stok, 2011; Tögel, 2002). Freud’s prolonged phobia about actually visiting Rome is documented in his letters to Fliess and others, as are his efforts to locate a rationale for this avoidance variously in his relations with his father, in the classical scholarship of his father-in-law, in the rabbinical exegeses of his grandfather-in-law, in his own cultural heritage, in his unease at the oppressively anti-Semitic atmosphere of Catholic Habsburg Vienna, and so forth (Momigliano, 1969; Roudinesco, 2014). Eventually he did travel to Rome after placing his personal reservations and his habitual evolutionary pessimism about civilization in a nervous and temporary abeyance.

Three observations about Freud and Rome are relevant to what follows. First, his attempts to interrogate the nature and identity of the Roman past were framed and to a perceptible degree parsed by his readings in the English-language volumes of Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929), pioneer of the modern archaeological and topographical study of the ancient city (Lanciani, 1888, 1893, 1897, 1899, 1910). Like Lanciani, Freud was sensitive, if at times melodramatic, in his desire to resurrect past lives from the pathos of present remains (Lanciani, 1890; Palombi, 2006). Second, Freud’s abiding fascination with Roman civilization became a componential thread in the development of the psychoanalytic project, and markedly so in the cases of Jung and later Lacan (Koelb, 2015). Third, and despite hesitations and disclaimers, Freud’s arresting portrait of the Roman past as an atemporal simultaneity of buildings reduced to ruins and remains continues to enjoy a vividly enduring resonance (Freud, 1930, 2002).

This article takes its cue from the foregoing. It deals with the now historic but still ongoing conversation between Freudian psychoanalysis and archaeological practice in the context of ancient Rome. It is focused around the person, writings, and opinions of Andrea Carandini (born 1937), the most productive, the most engagé, and certainly the best-known (to both scholars and the general public) archaeological excavator of Rome over the past 40 years. Carandini, as will be seen, is a most beguiling figure, a composite of scientific intellect and philosophical intuition, someone who has thought, said, and published a great deal about himself in relation to these two oscillating antinomies in his life and work. Whatever one thinks of Carandini, he sets himself against norms prevailing in the academy by overtly inserting himself into his scholarship in ways that can be at once candid, calculated, combative, and controversial, but also revelatory of something of the self that stands behind the prose.

Unsurprisingly, that sense of self has shifted and evolved over the decades so that reading Carandini’s oeuvre and obiter dicta gives access to a telling autobiographical commentary on what he thinks he is about as well as what he does. One result of this is that he is ‘good to think with’ (bon à penser) in the Lévi-Straussian sense, and not least because his views can be caustic and provocative as if designed to call forth dissenting responses. Carandini’s promiscuous and frequently unguarded verbal barrage, in his books, articles, appearances in the media, and the rest, has literally made this essay possible. He is the connective tissue in what follows, and the text is articulated around his life, career, opinions, and interventions. Carandini has observed that the decade or so that he spent in psychoanalysis when he was in his forties was a turning point in his life and a revelatory clarification of it. Thus the (hi)story that follows here is a matter of public record authored and hence authorized by the subject himself, an internationally renowned scholar and intellectual in Italy, Europe, and beyond.

Carandini’s family and formation

Andrea Carandini has an aristocratic background with strong ties to modern Italy’s liberal and leftist intelligentsia. He was a descendant of the Carandini of Modena, created counts after the epochal battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans in 1571. The title of Marchese of Sarzano was later added (Messori, 1997).

Andrea’s father was Count Nicolò Carandini (1896–1972). Liberal by background and personal inclination, he withdrew from public life during the fascist era. In 1943 he took part in the refounding of the secular Liberal Party, and in the following year the new government in liberated Rome sent him to London as Italian ambassador, a post he retained until 1947. Back home he involved himself in more left-leaning liberal politics, helping to found the tiny Radical Party before he retired in 1962. His wife, and the mother of their five children (Andrea being the second oldest), was Elena Albertini (1902–90). Her father, Luigi Albertini, was one of the best-known public intellectuals of his time. A lawyer by training, he emerged as the champion of a centrist liberalism that rejected the extremes of both fascism and socialism. He became an influential national voice as editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper until Mussolini forced his retirement in 1925.

Thereafter, until his death in 1941, Luigi Albertini lived in retreat with family members, including Elena, his son-in-law Nicolò, and their growing family, at his agricultural estate at Torre in Pietra near Rome. In enforced retirement he wrote an incisive and widely praised three-volume account of the causes and origins of the First World War. This was published in Italian shortly after his death, was later translated into English and other languages, and has never been out of print since. Simultaneously, Elena kept compendious if discontinuous diaries about the trials and rewards of daily life with reflections about the iniquities of fascism and her hopes for the revival of a liberal Italy. Later some of these were also published (Albertini, 1942 –3, 1950; Bartoli, 2007; Brié, 1972; E. A. Carandini, 1989, 1997, 2007, 2015; Riccardi, 1993).

It is beyond my remit here to speculate about relations between Andrea Carandini and his family. However, his numerous passing remarks on this subject over the years merit comment. Thus, in reviewing his past life the adult Carandini barely mentions his mother (or indeed his two wives). His famous maternal grandfather died when he was a small child, but Carandini now lives in the Albertini house in Rome and reportedly takes pride in showing visitors objects and mementoes there that in his view belong to the history of 20th-century Italy. However, throughout Carandini’s reminiscences it is his father Nicolò who emerges as the most vivid, if vexingly ambiguous, even opaque, presence. Under the influence of his own experience of psychoanalysis, Carandini has postulated connections between recurring dreams, first manifested when he was at school in London, an absence or remoteness in his father, the ambassador, and his own later decision to become an archaeologist.

In one of these dreams Carandini is going to meet his father at Claridge’s Hotel in London. The hotel is empty and he anxiously searches for his father. At last he comes upon him in a salon, where Nicolò is lunching with royal but unidentified personages. His father looks away and the son becomes afraid and does not know what to do. He looks outside through a window and sees an excavated Roman theatre. In another dream Carandini is nine years old (so, 1946), alone and feeling his way down a dark staircase in the London Underground. He cannot find any route back to the surface and continues to descend until he comes upon a small door. He opens it and sees before him a cemetery with men digging in it. They unearth women who remove jewels from their arms and necks but are otherwise paralysed. Carandini is on record as saying that he had not thought about the symbolic or predictive value of these dreams until he reached university and was pointed to his destiny as an archaeologist by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (1900–75), patently cast in this context as another father figure. The father figure has had something of a chequered history in psychoanalytical thinking, but if we combine Nicolò and Bianchi Bandinelli with Carandini’s subsequent devotion to his psychoanalyst and his writings about Romulus and Augustus, ‘fathers’ of Rome in different eras, then a visibly insistent thread of continuity is apparent (Gnoli, 2015; Trowell and Etchegoyen, 2002).

Carandini, Bianchi Bandinelli, and Marxism

The film L’uomo che non cambiò la storia (The Man Who Didn’t Change History) was shown out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2017. Directed by Enrico Caria, this documentary was an account of Hitler’s visit to Mussolini in Rome in May 1938. The script was adapted from the diaries of Bianchi Bandinelli, published after the war.

Son of a Sienese nobleman and his aristocratic German wife, Bianchi Bandinelli was bilingual. He studied archaeology at the University of Rome and then worked on the ancient Etruscan settlements of Clusium (Chiusi) and Suana (Sovana) close to his home. He taught at Italian universities and at Groningen, and in 1935 he co-founded Critica d’Arte. This journal invited a wide range of scholarship, but it underlined the ways in which Italian archaeology was a child of art history, aesthetics, and connoisseurship. Indeed, during the war Bianchi Bandinelli went on to publish the influential Storicità dell’arte classica (1943).

Like many members of his social class, Bianchi Bandinelli was a man whose faith in the inherited if paternalistic liberalism of his landowning family was shattered by the rise of fascism. However, his ethical travails remained private and were committed only to his diary (Barbanera, 2003; Barzanti, 1994; Bianchi Bandinelli, 1996). His detestation of Mussolini and all he stood for was certainly political, but it was also rooted in an aesthetic disdain, a distaste tinged with the self-conscious despair that he and the social class to which he belonged were now on the verge of historical redundancy. Notwithstanding, Bianchi Bandinelli’s social, linguistic, and academic skills recommended him to Mussolini’s advisers as the ideal cicerone to conduct Hitler around the historic sites (and sights) of Rome. It was only in a very different political environment after the war that Bianchi Bandinelli, by then a committed leftist, wrote a mock-heroic but still enraged and disgusted picaresque about his time as Hitler’s guide (Bianchi Bandinelli, 1995). He reflected that in 1938, clad in regulation fascist blackshirt and fez, and carrying a pistol, he might have changed history simply by shooting Il Duce and Der Führer, but he honestly admitted that he had lacked the nerve (hence the title of Caria’s film).

During 1943 the Italian Communist Party (PCI), banned by Mussolini since 1926, was revived and reconfigured. It distanced itself from Moscow’s directives, most notably by deciding to offer candidates for parliamentary elections. Bianchi Bandinelli finally elected to embrace a public political commitment by joining it in 1944. Once the war was over, his burgeoning academic reputation, and widely known sardonic moral integrity in the face of fascism and its pressures, meant that he survived the post-war purge of university personnel and was appointed the director of the new Ministry of Antiquities and Fine Arts (Flamigni, 2013, 2014). Moving to a professorial chair in art history and archaeology at La Sapienza in Rome, he became over time a barone, an academic with significant informal reach and influence over academic appointments and policies. At its corrupt worst the workings of this widespread and well-known phenomenon have been compared to those of the mafia, but even its fiercest critics concede that in some cases leading-edge research can emerge from a system that bypasses the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Italian state (Guerra, 2019; Herzfeld, 2009).

In Italy today, as in other Western European countries, the young tend to see the immediately post-war decades as a time of confident advance with a plethora of now vanished job opportunities (Pintucci and Cella, 2014). This nostalgia, if that is what it is, is certainly current in universities. Without secure jobs or research funding, younger Italian scholars have taken to the library shelves to excavate the historiographies of their own disciplines, including the ideas and projects of the aspirant barone Bianchi Bandinelli (see Cella, Gori, and Pintucci, 2016; Dyson, 2019, for a wider institutional portrait). Bianchi Bandinelli was an aristocrat, dedicated to the rarefied practice of traditional art history, and, like many intellectuals after the war, fearful that Europe’s cultural heritage would be by-passed by the American and Russian monoliths. Accordingly, he was the founding editor-in-chief of the initial seven volumes of the renowned Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, classica e orientale (1958–66). His principal assistant recalled that Bianchi Bandinelli was immensely hard-working, a singular individual of enormous ability who led from the front, and a man given to a concentrated meditative opacity that only served to magnify his charisma (Andreotti and de Melis, 2005).

However, Bianchi Bandinelli was also a committed leftist, convinced that Italian archaeology had to break free from its art historical roots and embrace the illumination cast by Marxist materialism and Gramscian cultural theory on the lives of people in the past. This concern came decisively to the forefront in the early 1960s. In 1962 Massimo Pallottino (1909–95), a pioneer of serious archaeological investigation of the Etruscans, used the pages of the journal Archeologia Classica to call for the forging of a unity of purpose among students of the classical past. Conservative and religious, Pallottino feared the rise in open tensions between Marxists and others. Intensive dialogue produced the Società degli Archeologi Italiani (SAI), but dispute persisted. In 1967 younger leftists within the SAI defected to form a group of ‘friends’ (amici) who founded the journal Dialoghi di Archeologia. The only senior scholar involved in this was Bianchi Bandinelli. He provided financial support and agreed to become institutional figurehead as the director of the new journal (Iacono, 2014).

Marxist in orientation and radically opposed to Crocean idealism, the new journal was a self-consciously collective enterprise that encouraged both methodological innovation in research and interdisciplinary debate. The amici, effectively a collective editorial group very much in tune with the political currents of universities in the later 1960s, were born mostly in the 1930s and 1940s. Influenced by scholars like the leftist British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, and eager to absorb ideas and approaches from emerging Anglo-American ‘new’ archaeology, the amici came to count among their number some future scholars of distinction (Giudi, 2014; Vittoria, 2014). Four figures stand out from among the amici as recognizably charismatic scholars, activists, enablers, networkers, and future baroni. Two of these, Mario Torelli and Filippo Coarelli, are not of immediate concern here. Of the remaining two, the prehistorian Renato Peroni (1930–2010) was a dedicated innovator in the direction and methodology of both archaeology and anthropology, although he was often at odds with some of his peers as well as with his elders (Peroni, 1959, 1980, 1982, 1994, 1996; Puglisi, 1959).

The fourth outstanding figure was the archaeologist Andrea Carandini, seven years younger than Peroni, and one of Bianchi Bandinelli’s research students. He arrived at La Sapienza planning to study classical philology with Ettore Paratore. Instead he encountered Bianchi Bandinelli, who proved to be complex, fascinating, and inspiring. Carandini thought ‘the red count’ seductive in the very complexity of his antinomies. He seemed to be tormented by unresolved contradictions between his aristocratic origins and his progressive views, a characteristic that the younger man recognized in himself. With hindsight Carandini compared his mentor to Thomas Mann in his ambivalence between his perceptions of the clear value of the past and the equally clear necessity of a new social order. This was a sombre view that Carandini identified in all of those who might have served as surrogate father figures, and it was a view that hardened as the years passed. In old age he confessed that he felt like an archaeological relic himself because he was forged by a world, a class, and an outlook that no longer existed (Gnoli, 2015).

Carandini’s early work and career

Carandini was hooked, and he wrote his thesis on the mosaics of the Casale villa at Piazza Armerina under Bianchi Bandinelli’s supervision. Later he noted that this study was as much art history as archaeology, but that it made him more aware of and familiar with the latter discipline. Further work with others ensued, and eventually a full account was published (Carandini, Ricci, and de Vos, 1982). Carandini began his academic career as an assistant professor at La Sapienza. Between 1971 and 1983 he was a professor of classical art and archaeology at the University of Siena, and held an analogous post at the University of Pisa from 1983 until 1992. Then, from 1992 until he retired in 2010, he was back at La Sapienza as professor of classical archaeology and art history. There in Rome, at the largest university in Italy and at the heart of the politics of the academic system, he taught the methods and techniques of archaeological excavation to successive cohorts of students and wrote and published prolifically (Capanna and d’Alessio, 2008).

Following significant archaeological work at Rome’s port of Ostia and at Carthage in Tunisia, Carandini made his academic reputation through the sustained excavation of a single site, most intensively, between 1975 and 1981 (Wickham, 1988). He headed an international team in terms of both personnel and funding. He brought up-to-date scientific methods to his project and exercised rigorous control over the excavation process. The site was a large Roman villa at Settefinestre near Cosa in southern Tuscany that had flourished between the first century BCE and the third century CE. Unlike Roman aristocratic houses or Neapolitan luxury retreats, the Settefinestre villa had been a centre of agribusiness. Excavations revealed that in its first incarnation it had produced wine, perhaps linked to the export from Cosa to Gaul of Sestius amphorae. The villa’s production seemed to have peaked at the time of Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), but in the second century CE its business had shifted to include intensive pig rearing. However, success had not been sustained and hence the villa had been abandoned circa 250 CE.

Roman agriculture on this scale was based on slave labour, and mode and means of production as topics fitted with the Marxist orientation of Carandini and some of his fellow amici. In addition, the architecture and layout of the villa itself suggested it might have taken planning inspiration from the ideal type described in the writings of Varro. This had been a working country house but one that had been quite notably decorated, and so Carandini and his team were able to make arguments about parallels with and borrowings from a variety of Roman building work, and to make an attempt to fit Settefinestre into what was known about the evolution of style and taste.

Settefinestre was a massive and demanding project. An interim report on the excavations was produced in 1980 (Carandini and Tatton-Brown, 1980), and the main site report followed five years later. This was a multivolume production, sumptuously printed and lavishly illustrated. Its technical rigour, acuity, and bulk were all testamentary declarations about a definitive coming of age in modern techniques of scientific investigation by Italian archaeologists who were influenced by their British counterparts. Nearly 50 academics from Italy and elsewhere, drawn from a range of relevant disciplines, contributed chapters to the three volumes (A. Carandini, 1985). Some went on to conduct further research at Settefinestre, across Etruria, and beyond, advancing their own reputations and careers as the years passed. Most germanely, the Settefinestre project gave Carandini a leading role in Roman archaeology, and he assumed the mantle of barone. It was very much his project, and it conferred upon him a sense of entitled ownership together with access to the disbursive powers of academic patronage and influence.

In the aftermath of Carandini’s landmark excavations, survey work was extended to the Albegna valley, adjacent coastal areas, and the three Roman colonies of Cosa, Heba, and Saturnia, to situate Settefinestre in its wider context (Attolini, Cambi, and Celuzza, 1982). However, the dispersal of the field team, and the loss of some records and maps, meant that these additional findings were published only in part and many years after the project (Carandini and Cambi, 2002). This volume was for the most part received respectfully, but Andrew Wilson, the newly created professor of the archaeology of the Roman empire at Oxford, pointed out its oddities and defects in a lengthy review (Wilson, 2004; Woolf, 2004). He noted that the volume was edited by Carandini and his associate Cambi, but also ‘with’ Celuzza and Fentress. This, he said, had come as a surprise to the latter two authors, both of them women, ‘whose unrevised texts were used without their knowledge or, indeed, approval’. In general terms the book was incomplete, offering no definitive catalogue of the finds, and while it contained many suggestive data, none was fully contextualized and analysed. Wilson added that the volume opened with ‘an extraordinary introduction’ by Carandini, written in an ‘idiosyncratic tone’ and with ‘ad hominem attacks on his collaborators’. He concluded that all this said more about Carandini himself than about his ‘targets’ (Wilson, 2004: 569). In fact, by then, and by his own admission, Carandini had changed as a person. It is time now to look into the causes and consequences of this transformation.

National and personal disorientation

When the lens is widened, it can be seen that the entire Settefinestre project took place across the time that Italians term the violent anni di piombo or ‘years of lead’ and then the corrupt anni di fangi (‘years of mud’) of the 1970s and 1980s (Bull and Giorgio, 2005; Ginsborg, 2003; Magri, 2012; Montanelli and Cervi, 2012, 2018; Piccolo, 2013). This was a period in which both state and society in Italy suffered debilitating incoherence from a fragmentation marked by extremes of right- and left-wing violence, and by the visible proliferation of kleptocracy and conspiracy theories. Most pertinently, the PCI entered a time of crisis. After the killing of Allende in Chile in 1973, PCI national secretary Enrico Berlinguer came to believe that a distancing from Moscow and some sort of a ‘historical compromise’ with the ruling Christian Democrats (DC) were the necessary preconditions for his party to be permitted to participate in government. This compromesso istorico was set out in 1976. The PCI proposed an alliance with the DC, but the latter refused this overture, and this split the PCI membership. Uncompromising elements distanced themselves from the party and took to violence, sometimes condoned by the disoriented and confused mass membership. Significantly, terrorists were evasively referred to as being i compagni che sbaglioni (‘the comrades who make mistakes’) by their more peaceful peers.

Bianchi Bandinelli died in 1975. Carandini felt this as a personal loss rather than a political one. Simply, an exemplary guide, mentor, and fatherly presence had disappeared. Thirty-five years later, in different circumstances, Carandini made careful distinctions between himself and the man who had made him into an archaeologist. Both were aristocrats, but while Bianchi Bandinelli had been guiltily tortured about his rank and status, Carandini denied any conferred advantage and thought he was a man who had simply taken the chances that had come his way. He opined that Bianchi Bandinelli had thought of communism as a secular faith, ‘a new Christianity’, but to his pupil it had always been just a mechanism for moving towards a more equitable society. By the time he said this, Carandini had long since experienced a ‘disappointment’ with Marxism and had made a conscious ‘renunciation’ of it (Gnoli, 2015).

Indeed, by the early 1980s the world of Italian communism and the PCI was riven, fractured, uncertain, and much weakened in its ideological appeal. In the worlds of the academy and archaeology the Dialoghi di Archeologia had lost whatever cutting edge it might once have had. With its presiding spirit Bianchi Bandinelli now gone, it staggered on through two relaunches in 1979 and again in 1983 before ceasing publication altogether in 1992. In its heyday it had been a forum in which those united around a leftist, materialist approach to archaeology might find support and stimulation. This mood and its aspirations underwrote the project on slave agriculture at Settefinestre, and it enabled Carandini to import and foster scientific archaeological techniques and practices. In 1981 Carandini published a manual for those wishing to learn to be archaeologists. It has never been out of print since then, and it is still widely used by students. In retrospect, this book can be set alongside the conclusion of the Settefinestre project as a capstone and finale to this period in Carandini’s life and thought (A. Carandini, 1979, 1981).

Carandini and Matte-Blanco

By the close of the 1970s Italy was reeling from a seemingly unending series of convulsions. No doubt this impacted on Carandini as it did on his fellow citizens, but these turbulent alarums and excursions also formed a resonant backdrop to a deepening personal crisis in his own life. He has made passing mention of what had brought him to this point (Gnoli, 2015). He was fundamentally dissatisfied with himself. His first marriage had broken up. He had achieved some kind of unspecified rapprochement with his father, but the latter had died in 1972, three years before Bianchi Bandinelli, and Carandini felt a persistent sense of acute loss, abandonment, and sadness. Moreover, he had come to the close of a rewarding but intensive and exhausting archaeological project in Tuscany carried out under the banner of Marxist materialism. As he looked around for a new area of endeavour, he was more and more certain that the ideological premisses that had framed his earlier work were played out and redundant.

In 1978 or thereabouts Carandini entered into psychoanalysis for the best part of a decade. His encounter with the Chilean-born psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco (1908–95) was a life-changing experience and one that he was often to acknowledge as such. Born in Santiago, Matte-Blanco graduated as a doctor there in 1930. He entered analysis with Fernando Allende Navarro, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Latin America (Honorato, 2012). He then went to London to train as a psychoanalyst. He attended the seminars of Melanie Klein, supervised the case of a child with Anna Freud, became a friend of Wilfred Bion, whom he thought of as a father figure or older brother, and encountered James Strachey, the young Winnicott and Glover, Sharpe, Brierley, Riviere, and Rickman (Fasoli, 1993). He practised and taught in the United States before returning home in 1943. There he became one of the founders of the Chilean Psychoanalytical Society. Then in 1966 he travelled to Rome, and after the coup that removed Allende he never again returned to Chile. He lived and practised in Rome, where he died in his late eighties in 1995 (Alameda, 2005; Vetö, 2017; Vetö and Sánchez, 2017).

Matte-Blanco was a theorist as well as a practitioner. His interest was in advancing understanding of the unconscious beyond the thinking of Freud. The latter’s views of this matter were contained in an ever-evolving series of interventions that all at once invited and presumed further exploration (Freud, 1953[1900], 1953[1901], 1958a[1911], 1958b[1911], 1958[1912], 1961[1923], 1964[1932]). Matte-Blanco’s work in this area appeared in book form in English in 1975. This attracted notice and a small but devoted cult following, as did a second volume in 1988 that enlarged on his earlier arguments (Carli and Giovagnoli, 2010; Carvalho et al., 2009; Ginzburg and Lombardi, 2007; Lombardi, 2016; Matte-Blanco, 1975, 1988; Rayner, 1996; Sanchez-Cardenas, 2011). Let us confine discussion to matters at hand. Matte-Blanco applied mathematical propositions to Freud’s theories and developed from this the concept of unconscious logic (or bi-logic). This was ruled over by the two principles of generalization and symmetry. The first of these explained that unlike the logic of the conscious system, the logic of the unconscious did not consider individuals as units, but as members of larger units like classes or sets, and that Freudian displacement took place according to this principle. The second, and more important here, according to Matte-Blanco, required the unconscious always to treat the obverse/converse of every relationship in the same way, as if it were always identical to it.

A consequence of this second principle, Matte-Blanco claimed, was the abolition of linear time and space and their collapse into timelessness and spacelessness. The principle of symmetrization precluded development, and the result was an infinitization process, that is, a simultaneity and a repetition without end of that which was conventionally termed the historical. In his eightieth year Matte-Blanco gave an interview about his work. He lauded the Neruda poem that is extracted at the start of this paper because in it the Inca mountain fortress at Machu Picchu was represented as a simultaneity standing outside of time and space (in a sense like Freud’s famous metaphor about Rome and its ruins). He went on to credit Freud with the discovery of timelessness, but since the unconscious was processual in time there was a contradiction. This was an antinomy, but Matte-Blanco said it was one that existed in all human lives nevertheless, At times the unconscious followed the rules of Aristotelian logic, but for the most part it treated time as if it did not exist. It was plain that this had profound implications for the understanding of empirical events in any historical inquiry rooted in linear time (Fasoli, 1993).

Matte-Blanco’s impact on his analysand Carandini was at once immediate, sustained, and enduring. In 1981, as noted, the latter authored a pioneering Italian manual on stratigraphic and other archaeological techniques, and he dedicated this book to his psychoanalyst (A. Carandini, 1981). We have some glimpses into this analytic encounter. Matte-Blanco was himself a ‘strong personality’, whose approach was to ‘demand’ that his interlocutors strive for an ‘undogmatic authenticity’ in their ‘difficult’ encounters with him (Alava, 2010: 22). Matte-Blanco sometimes showed up unannounced at Carandini’s home. Conversational exchanges without rules followed, in which Carandini said he lost track of the formal relationship and just felt blessed by his participation in an incredible intellectual adventure. It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Matte-Blanco fell ill and into decline at the end of the 1980s. By then Carandini had forged a new partnership, and a daughter was born in 1989. After these life changes he wrote to Matte-Blanco to thank him and to call an end to their professional relationship. Carandini received no reply. He felt distress, even anguish, at his decision to part from Matte-Blanco, for, as he later recalled, he had come to cast him in the role of a symbolic father (Gnoli, 2015).

Whatever else transpired, at some level Carandini internalized and applied his interlocutor’s core opinions on the labile plasticity of time and space as decreed by the structural unconscious. It has been noted that Freud himself had a very complicated relationship with Rome, and although he advanced only to put aside his much-cited imaginary of the past of the city as a visual simultaneity of eras and buildings, this metaphor has never lost its power, for it addresses the psychical yearning for a past that is coherent and transparent. If this is combined with Matte-Blanco’s abolition of time and space, then for an archaeologist or historian it can be the call of the siren. Carandini drew from all of this the lesson that the archaeologist must go ever further back in time to foundational truths, in all senses of that capacious term, and that the tools of reason and empiricism were not sufficient to pursue this quest. He thought now that foundational origins partook of mystery and fantasy, and that these constituted the very air that surrounded the archaeologist. In a predictably analogous way, Carandini came to construe legend as the palpable noise or undergirding beneath the (hi)storical past that the investigator formulated as narrative (Gnoli, 2015).

It was during his association with his psychoanalyst that Carandini found and started on his new project, Elements of this were consonant with Matte-Blanco’s theorizing, but the extent of his explicit or subconscious guidance towards this choice must remain moot. Carandini planned to excavate (or in places to re-excavate) the north slope of the Palatine Hill and associated sites in the Forum in the heart of ancient Rome. His purpose was to fix and explain the origins of Rome and ipso facto the beginnings of much of Western culture and civilization.

Carandini’s Rome: I. Looking for ways into the past

Excavating in the centre of Rome presented challenges greater than those posed by working at Settefinestre. Just securing permission to dig in the area that was the hub of the tourist industry must have required the mobilization of all the connections available to the barone Carandini. Once the project was in train, he brought to it all the skills honed in his earlier work.

Scholarship on Rome has a long and vibrant topographical tradition. Current leaders in this field include Filippo Coarelli, another protégé of Bianchi Bandinelli, and Eva Margareta Steinby, professor of the archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford and sometime director of the Finnish Institute in Rome (Coarelli, 1983, 1988, 2004, 2006, 2008; Steinby, 1974, 1993–2000). Carandini, however, intended to advance beyond such incidental topography with its listing of more or less plausible identifications of successive constructions on specific sites. His agendum was to lay every possible archaeological site open and transparent as landscape by digging until he reached what he considered to be the limit or the bottom. The influence of Matte-Blanco (and Freud) is salient here, and this was confirmed by Carandini in retrospect. He firmly repudiated all academic boundaries and compared disciplinary specialization to the intellectual nullity of a prison or grave. He lauded curiosity and instinct above all, and asserted that a scholar ended up going nowhere without these characteristics (Gnoli, 2015).

In 1985, just west of the Arch of Titus where the northern slopes of the Palatine met the Forum, Carandini found the remains of houses from the late Republic. One of these he identified as the dwelling of a man who had been consul in 115 BCE. Underneath were four more buildings from the sixth century BCE. Further excavations (1986–93) showed that these had been built on top of an artificial platform. Beneath this Carandini found a preserved stretch of wall that seemingly included a gateway. He dated these finds to the mid eighth century BCE. The gate, he argued, was the Porta Mugonia. Even more boldly, he claimed the remnant of wall was a portion of the circuit said in literary sources to have been built by Romulus, legendary founder and first ruler of the city, who was supposed to have lived in the eighth century BCE. In 2000 all of this was laid before the public in a lavish exhibition (A. Carandini, 1992; Carandini and Cappelli, 2000; Carandini and Carafa, 1995: a dissenting view is in Coarelli, 1996; a summary excavation chronology is in Hall, 2014: 119–22).

Meanwhile Carandini excavated a little further to the west and south, where topographers located the Domus Publica, the residence of the Pontifex Maximus. A dozen identifiable layered phases came to light, datable from the mid eighth century BCE to the destructive Neronian conflagration of 64 CE. The earliest date was congruent with that of Carandini’s ‘Romulan’ wall, and when he then unearthed a courtyard dwelling there from this first phase, he identified it as the royal palace of Romulus or of his successor. Afterwards Carandini went on to find a grotto beneath the house of the first emperor, Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), and postulated that this might have been the Lupercal, the legendary cave reported in the literary sources as the place where the twins Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf.

In 1988 Carandini’s interim discoveries and theories about Romulus and the foundation of Rome were publicized in the media. This caused a global sensation. Then in 1997 he published an 800-page book that furnished forth a prequel to the coming of Romulus. La nascita di Roma is a curious but clever construct. It supplies an argument of dense ethnographic and historical speculation about the archaeological finds that predate the coming of Romulus. This permits the founder to be accorded his customary dating to the mid eighth century BCE and casts him as the individual who rationalized and organized what he inherited, thereby moving Rome on from proto-history to its formal historical creation. The date that Carandini supplies for this foundation is the traditional one of 753 BCE, but it should be noted that this is not the only one in the literary sources (Timaeus, for one, supplies an eccentric date of 813 BCE), and in fact none of these dates is supported by any conclusive empirical evidence. Thus, in La nascita Romulus appears in the epilogue at the end of the book after almost 500 pages of preliminary discussion that works to condition the reader for his (seemingly inevitable?) appearance. This is not by any means an easy book to read, but a decade after its publication Carandini summarized its principal findings and his further thoughts for a general readership (A. Carandini, 2007). Readers must decide for themselves whether or not Carandini’s conjectural bricolage to make his reconstructions fit with the archaeological chronology is valid or not. Others have tried in a similar manner to resolve gaping lacunae in the strictly historical evidence by resort to theorizing (Briquel, 2018; Grandazzi, 1997, 2017).

In La nascita Carandini advances a case for the veracity of atemporal mythography, arguing that it can carry the living and unsullied memories of an oral culture over centuries. He lists the major events (grandi avvenimenti) that calibrated the period from 1600–1300 BCE to the building of the Palatine wall and the formal founding of the city by Romulus in 753 BCE. Indeed, he argues that the Palatine wall was multiply rebuilt into the Augustan age, and that this reworking sustained an intact oral memory of what it signified until it was finally written down. Carandini is prone to the misapprehension that mythographic traditions must contain within them a kernel of truth (nocciolo autentico; Hell, 2019; Sahlins, 2017). He goes on to suggest that the living memory of oral tradition, later on handed down via literary texts, is the only bulwark of truth against modern presumptions and anachronisms. Finally, he explicitly embraces the world opened up to him by and with Matte-Blanco. The case is made that myths are better understood via intuitive emotional or unconscious reactions than via cognitive intellectual processes. That is, the sleep of reason is desirable, and so it is to be encouraged (A. Carandini, 1997: xxv, 9–13, 36–7, 632–3, 641–4; compare now A. Carandini, 2017c).

In 2000 Carandini, by now a familiar figure in the media and to the public, produced a biographical memoir that set out a range of his ideas and thoughts (A. Carandini, 2000). In a way this book is a pendant to La nascita, an attempt to ground and to explain the changes that have occurred in the mental world of its author. This memoir claims that La nascita is all at once archaeology and history, but also a means of analysing the author’s life so as to reveal and to communicate his experiences. Certain threads can be picked out. Carandini asserts that there are direct links between the novelist’s evocation of a world and the historian’s reconstruction of a past. His preferred writers of fiction are Proust, James, and Mann, masters of observation of material realities as filtered through the sovereign interiority of the author. There can also be little doubt that Carandini saw resonant echoes of his own familial descent, status, and relationships in the fictive histories of the Guermantes and Buddenbrooks and in the Jamesian mix of aristocracy and wealth. He also claims that he already understood all of this, but credits Matte-Blanco with producing the liberating shock of recognition via psychoanalysis. Another thread, connected perhaps with Carandini’s uncomfortable time as an Italian boy at school in an England that had just defeated his own country, is his ambiguous attitude towards his childhood hosts. He presents historical empiricism as an archaic tic of the English because of their devotion to the false gods of detachment and objectivity. A subtext here is Carandini’s admission of an insecurity that he thinks the English to be culturally immunized against, paired with a sense that empiricist classical historians from that country patronize archaeologists, and particularly foreign ones. Lastly in this context, Carandini writes of the lares in Roman culture. These were guardian spirits, entities that watched over and shaped individual lives. He names his personal lares as his father, Bianchi Bandinelli, and Matte-Blanco (A. Carandini, 2000: 3–7, 22, 28–30, 58–61, 77–8, 84–8, 92–7, 102, 127–9, 153).

Carandini’s Rome: II. Meditating on history and life

In the two decades since 2000 Carandini has produced an enviable quantity of published work for a man of his years. It is often written in tandem with others, but there is no doubt that in the familiar Italian manner the barone is in charge. These contributions are for the most part enlargements or refinements of familiar arguments, now extended in time to the age of Augustus and beyond. They are written in a late manner, that is, a personal idiom, almost a recognizable signature, by which is meant a distillation to essentials of the authorial voice (Said, 2003, 2007). Carandini combines deep learning with a combative style that switches between defence and attack and is peppered more than ever with personal idiosyncrasies and quirks. All this is apparent in the monumentalization of his own thinking and achievement over a lifetime that is on display in the massive atlas of ancient Rome that at last he ushered into print in 2012 (A. Carandini, 2012). Published two years after his retirement from La Sapienza (followed by a succession of jobs in national cultural policy), the atlas was greeted as an international media event. It signalled to many the very model of the idealized later life of the most exalted Italian academic. It linked together a patronage formed at universities and a public persona displayed across the media with access to the state and the benefices at its disposal. By my own count the atlas has 31 named contributors, seemingly all Italian. Of these, the core that did the bulk of the writing were nearly all pupils, junior associates, or clients of Carandini. A number were already collaborators in defending his vision of Rome against the many criticisms of other classicists (on Fraschetti, see Carandini, Carafa, and d’Alessio, 2008; on Coarelli, see Carafa and Bruno, 2013; on Beard, see ‘La prima Roma di Mary Beard’, in Carandini et al., 2017: Vol. 1, 47–56).

After the reviews were in, Carandini took the opportunity of the translation of the atlas into English to write a new preface to it (A. Carandini, 2017: Vol. 1, 1–14). This begins with a declaration that echoes the historical simultaneity of Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents, and a brief endorsement of the atemporality of Matte-Blanco’s unconscious logic. Carandini then decries the isolating attention accorded to significant buildings by scholars. Instead, he urges an opening up of the topographical mind to implicit as well as explicit interconnections across a whole landscape. Everything seen or merely sensed, from single tiles in a mosaic to individual words in a sentence, he argues, is equally important to understanding. In a range of metaphors that compare the development of Rome to an organic or natural evolution presided over by the genius loci of the place and its interpreter Carandini, he reiterates the findings made in La nascita. He claims that under the sign of psychoanalysis he has brought into being a ‘topographical hermeneutics’ that is asserted rather than defined. Then at last we arrive at the heart of the matter. Studying Rome, so Carandini declares, demands that the investigator behave in precisely the same way as if trying to understand the self. This depends on the incomplete recuperation of memories and haphazard intuitions about the future. Locke and Hume are brought into play, but the real shadow presence here is Matte-Blanco with his fundamental scepticism about a ‘temporal continuum’ either in the life of an individual or in the evolution of Rome. At the end Carandini declares that the past of the city of Rome is ‘a continuum only in fiction’, and that the mastery of archaeology over this landscape of ruins ‘requires a clear affirmation of the researcher’s self’. Rome, then, is not ‘the mechanical sum of its parts’, but rather ‘a fully organic organism’ in which buildings are like neurons in an intelligence. These neurons afford a point of view, and all such perspectives ‘fuse into one enormous collective mind’.

Carandini was 75 when his self-conscious magnum opus of an atlas was published in 2012. In the English-language preface composed five years later he mentioned only one contemporary classical historian. This was T. P. Wiseman, who was a scant three years younger than Carandini, and who had already published ‘an ample review’ of the Italian edition. This, Carandini added succinctly, ‘will prove important in making the work known to the Anglo-Saxon world’. He went on to reassure Wiseman that ‘(as opposed to our facts and arguments) our method is in continual development’ and hence in no way ‘dogmatic’. In fact, if it had not been for attention to this methodological evolution, ‘the achievement Wiseman claims to have recognized would have been impossible’ (A. Carandini, 2017: Vol. 1, 4, 7–8).

These remarks were jejune, perhaps even disingenuous. In his review Wiseman had written of Carandini’s atlas with arch exasperation (Wiseman, 2013). In fact, this was one waystation on a road long travelled. In 2000 Wiseman reviewed La nascita after two years of multiple re-readings, ‘for I have still no idea how to review it’. It was a ‘great work but an impossible one’, for it ‘both demands serious intellectual engagement and at the same time defies it’ (Wiseman, 2000). In a like manner the atlas trumpeted a methodology (which presumably included the ‘topographical hermeneutics’) that was little more than ‘rhetorical polemic aimed at the preconceptions of historians (especially the scuola inglese)’ (Wiseman, 2013). Wiseman is a long-standing critic of the Carandini that emerged after undergoing psychoanalysis. He has written a great deal himself, and continues to engage with Carandini’s texts long after other empirical classical historians of his kind have consigned them to silence or scepticism (Cornell, 1995; Forsythe, 2005). In his most recent book on the history of ‘the house of Augustus’ his principal target is once more the work of Carandini (Wiseman, 2019: 23, 28). This is a quarrel that offers no chance of reconciliation. Wiseman is committed to the empirical method that Carandini now disdains. There is another reason why this circle cannot be closed. Simply, historical empiricism in the study of early Rome is reliant upon written texts produced centuries after the events they purport to describe. In this situation there can be no final word, and, indeed, Wiseman himself has been rebuked for speculative conclusions drawn from his undoubted mastery of what are incomplete and contradictory records (Beard, 2009, 2015: 541).

For over a decade now Carandini has been publishing books that simplify and reiterate his arguments for an interested public, while continuing to produce elaborations of his thinking about Rome (A. Carandini, 2010, 2011, 2016, 2017d, 2018a; Carandini and Papi, 2019). In Italy he has become a seer, at least in the sense that his views are sought on all manner of issues. Most to the point here, in 2017 he wrote a short book about the antinomies he saw in his own life experience. This had the distinctly archaeological subtitle of digging into and excavating the self or ego (A. Carandini, 2017a). The book was composed of 142 reflections on emotion and reason drawn from ancient sources. Carandini set down his opinion that emotion was primordial and had come first. It was archaic and comforting, with the ability to reveal a whole world in condensed detail. Reason had followed, with its somewhat mechanical capacities for organization, distinction, and judgement. For Carandini, the antinomies that ensued from the mutual dependence of emotion and reason were the truest source of knowledge and understanding. They were prior to and more significant than the Western investments made in sovereign logic since the time of Aristotle.

Here Carandini implicitly revisited Freud and Matte-Blanco, and explained himself and his work in terms of the ceaselessly fruitful interplay of these antinomies. Indeed, in an interview he gave when the book was published he said explicitly that the source of his reasoning in the text had been generated and then matured from his lengthy psychoanalytical encounter with Matte-Blanco. Psychoanalysis had also taught him that antinomies were most fruitful when ‘well tempered’ (ben temperata), a kind of bi-modal catechism for life and work (Panza, 2017). This echo of Matte-Blanco is far indeed from the procedures of orthodox archaeologists and historians. Carandini appears to have been saying, in the manner of Vico (or even Croce), that the dissection of historical processes always presumed a philosophy of history that framed an understanding arrived at intuitively. So, as first unveiled by Freud, history was a chaos and a harmony of emotion and reason. This was a necessary but dauntingly difficult thing to address because, in the term employed by Matte-Blanco, the finite was controllable because conceivable but the infinite could only be ‘feasible’ (A. Carandini, 2018b).

Concluding remarks

Rome and its past are objectively monumental presences in Western history, and in the ocean of subjective imaginaries woven from and around them. The matter of Rome is culturally inspissated, with long centuries of commentary and reflection thickened and congealed around it. In sum, Rome is a seriously overdetermined subject. It has for long been a totemic site in the European imaginary’s ‘desire for the past’ mentioned at the start of this paper. Edward Gibbon himself, after 25 years had elapsed, wrote that he was ‘not very susceptible to enthusiasm’, but still, ‘I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city’ (Gibbon, 1984: 141; original emphasis).

The consequence is that writing about Rome is an act that needs to remain always vigilant about the preconceptions already planted in the authorial self by the immense discourse authorized by the sheer cultural density of the subject matter. Of course, the preconditioned self is there in all writing, but the status of Rome as a touchstone and point of reference in the Western tradition means that it has an unusually strong capacity to shape individual sensibilities at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Thus, by way of summary example, the historian Syme sought clues and insights to explain Hitler in the last tumultuous century of the Roman Republic; and the poet Brodsky, in Soviet exile on the White Sea, identified his fellow poet Ovid, deported from Rome to the shore of the Black Sea almost 2000 years earlier, as his twin or doppelgänger in a continuously living tradition (Syme, 1939; Volkov, 1998).

For a conventionally trained and inclined historian the wellsprings of these impulses are to be acknowledged as seductions towards an autobiographical exploration that should be resisted and quarantined. That is to say, the Roman past must and does properly ‘vibrate’ within the mind of such a historian, but orthodoxy ordains that such sensations should never be permitted to spill over into an embrace of the subjective aims and purposes of an individual selfhood in the business of recuperating the past (Collingwood, 1946).

Let me try to sum up. The empirical substance of this essay has been about why, how, and with what consequences Andrea Carandini, the archaeological investigator of early Rome, came to transgress received historical norms and then to neglect or abandon them. Most working archaeologists, prehistorians, or historians of all places or periods subscribe – that is, if and when they think about the matter at all – to some version or variant of Momigliano’s celebrated catechism about working on the past that lists le regole del giuoco nello studio della storia antica, or ‘the rules of the game in the study of ancient history’ (Momigliano, 1974, 2016). These guidelines are embedded in and bounded by the discovery and interpretative employment of documentary and ancillary sources. The devil is not at all in this literal detail, however, but is and always has been in the degree of conscious control that the historian is able or willing to exercise over the inescapable impulses of selfhood that frame and inflect interpretation of any and all historical problems.

It needs to be openly admitted, however, that whatever the nature of its embedded orthodoxies, history is not and has never been a science, let alone an exact one. It is not an overstatement of the case to say that Momigliano’s ‘rules of the game’ are in and of themselves a temporal construct, traceable in the first instance to 18th-century German Quellenkritik and then to its 19th-century positivist refinement and expansion. Even Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), apostle of the positivist creed of recounting history ‘as it really was’ – wie es eigentlich gewesen ist – seems to have deviated from his objective empirical strictness when it came to writing about the past of his wife’s Irish Catholic culture (Boldt, 2014). To put it simply, the truth claims of history writing are unstably grounded in the interpretative capacities and ethical biases of individual historians working from, with, and on an always incomplete and sometimes even threadbare record. It might be argued, then, that the complex trajectory of Carandini’s intellectual career, discussed in detail above, is no more or less authoritative in its interpretations than those of his more orthodox critics like Wiseman. An inclusive reading would argue that both are searching after truths about the past that satisfy their ‘truth’ to themselves as subjective actors. Surely the foregrounding of interpretation, with its plethora of approaches and the uses made of them by individuals, should be more freely and openly acknowledged. After all, in practice this is what historians actually do, even if many among them still feel impelled to gesture towards an idealized but chimerical ‘truth’ that is presumed to be somewhere ‘out there’ awaiting discovery.

It is my final contention here that we may well disagree with Carandini’s chosen methods and the results they produce, but surely his catholicity in his attempts to bring novel perspectives to bear upon the past is a matter for some celebration. He is also in tune with the mood music of the present in the aftermath of the linguistic and cultural turns and the resulting fragmentation of the certainties of the Enlightenment project. This has engendered wide and experimental processes of intellectual rethinking and reformulation. Some of these are of course missteps or blind alleys, but it is the urgent willingness to rethink inherited disciplinary boundaries and barriers that is of fundamental significance. Some, of course, regret the liquidation of received certainties or otherwise mourn the disappearance of familiar frameworks that informed and shaped their earlier intellectual investments (compare Gray, 2018, with Eley, 2005, and Israel, 2019: 923–42). With due caution others embrace the now prevalent and still growing intellectual diversity of history writing in our times. In this endeavour there is a place for historians to consider the utility of psychoanalytic understandings for their own projects. Psychoanalysis, it has been argued, ‘is not the key to all lived experience’, but it yields insights into the past that are ‘hypothetical and provisional, as indeed are all historical interpretations’ (Alexander and Taylor, 2012: 7; emphasis added). Thus, Carandini can be seen as an instance of a historical actor whose subjectivity, evolving via engagement with the tools of psychoanalysis, has been encouraged to a consideration of himself in tandem with his comprehension of the past. Moreover, the antinomies evident in his life and thinking must be recognizable in some measure to all those currently engaged in attempts at innovative knowledge production across the spectrum of scholarly disciplines.