A neolithic culture on the analytic couch.

First a little contextual information about how 1 became involved with the Çatalhöyük research. I spent ten years working as an ethnographer among hunter gatherers, agriculturalists, pasturalists and early urban dwellers in Kenya and then trained for six years to be an ethnoarchaeologist at Cambridge. My earlier work as a structuralist was concerned with symbolic and/or social uses of Swahili houses and artifacts: However, people kept saving, "Linda - spears and couches don’t play social role, that process is only in the minds of peoples" So I went to San Francisco and trained for seven years to be a psychoanalyst. All along, my primary interest has been the psychological uses of the archaeological data. I think this Is why I was asked to offer an interpretation of the exciting images and finds from Çatalhöyük.

Warning - this paper is about feelings. Archaeologists are often uncomfortable talking about emotions.

Back in the 20’s Roheim. an analyst, quoting Kroeber, who was analysed, said that students of cultural phenomena, whether anthropologist, sociologist or historians (and I might add archaeologists) have always recognized that their material contains psychological aspects, but they leave these implicit. I want to make them explicit but stress that I see my perspective as only one of many possible interpretations. My ideas are provisional because of the lack of detailed contextual data. I will attempt to apply various psvchoanalvtic theories to the Çatalhöyük data, without projecting the historical context in which the ideas were developed.

I am going to give a brief review, of the psychological underpinning of how objects are given meaning. And then explain how, I think this psychological process allowed conflicts to he resolved, which enabled larger settlements to form and domestication of cattle and plants to evolve.

Human Infants 9000 years ago and now are dependent on caretakers for their survival longer than any other animal. Infants slowly become aware that they are a separate beings from their caretakers. Mothering is usually done by a females because of their breast feeding capabilities. Borrowing from the analyst Chirstopher Bollas. the mother is a "transformational process" Mothers, he says are able to change the internal and external environment to meet the infant’s needs, but babies do not know that a separate person is performing these functions. If the person is a "good enough mother" in the analyst D.W.Winnicott’s terms, and the child’s needs are met enough of the time, the child is not distressed and does not feel overwhelmed by its needs. The child begins to have an illusion that she/he is producing the breast by thinking about it because it usually appears when the infant is hungry. The care for the child supports this magical thinking.

In a similar manner the mother’s attention also fosters the child’s self esteem and thus the ability to want to be independent. As the child develops, a separation process takes place. The child becomes more able to care for itself. Human beings use the external world to provide for their physical well being but the contributions made by the material world to their internal or emotional well- being seems to often be overlooked or undervalued.

However, Winnicott pointed out the use of material objects in the child’s critical separation process from the mother. Just after the child is weaned he or she creates what Winnicott calls a "transitional object" . A transitional object (a blanket or piece of cloth,) is something that a child -selects from the real world and gives it symbolic powers. The child’s thoughts give the object special significance which is respected by others. (I just saw a train compartment full of unrelated people trying to find a distressed child’s favourite Teddy Bear - Not one person thought the loss was unimportant.) The act of a child giving meaning to an object it; a cross-cultural phenomenon but not observed in other animals. This psychological process allows material objects to "hold" meaning for people of all ages. The first attributes given to objects:-4re human characteristics. We seem to believe that if we have feelings and can think other-.animals and inanimate objects do too. Freud said that Animism was our first system of thought or our first psychology. I would like to add that I think it grew out of the relationship with the mother.

The analyst Melanie Klein observed that infants always express some anxiety because caretakers can not always supply instantly what the infant wants or needs. The newborn can’t grasp intellectually what is happening and feels every discomfort as if it was inflicted by a hostile force. If comfort is given (for instance food) the child experiences gratification, often from the breast. This gives rise to happier emotions, making possible the first loving relationship. In the beginning the baby’s whole world - both good and bad leads to a two fold attitude toward the mother even under the best possible conditions. The breast is both nourishing and good but when the breast is not there, or dry the child becomes angry. This anger may lead to a wish to retaliate - perhaps to bite the breast. As the child matures he/she may become afraid to bite the mother for fear she will retaliate.

These molded breasts on the house walls at Çatalhöyük, if these are "breasts" as many think, could be seen as positive and nurturing but with the addition of vulture’s beaks, boar’s tusks, fox teeth and weasel’s skulls implanted in the breasts ~ they take on an aggressive, negative flavor. This psychological interpretation of these breasts would support Ian Hodder’-,s idea that these wall moldings represent the negative and positive about women. The same could be said about the breast moldings that have open or inverted nipples. The symbolism could be read as the breast as a biting mouth or of a bitten breast. I see these breasts as early symbols of the love/ hate relationship with the mother and maybe with women in general who help each other care for children and adult males. I believe that people have always struggled with the desire and need to be taken care of and the pull to be independent.

This working through of separation anxiety was also described by Freud. He watched his young nephew playing with a wooden spool with a string tied around it. The child repeatedly threw the spool over the edge of his bed, made sad noise, pulled it back and made a joyful sound. Freud interpreted the play as an attempt to control distress and pleasure by repeating the mothers’ leaving and returning with the spool. The child who felt like the passive victim was attempting to master his distress by actively controlling the process. If Freud had asked the child what he was doing he would have said, "playing." He would not have replied that he was trying to master the distress if his mother leaving him without making a fuss and thereby risking her retaliation. Even the people at Çatalhöyük may not have known, on a conscious level, why they made images of breasts, vultures and female figures. But we may gain some insight by considering what distress their architectural features and objects represent. It seems, safe to say that the people at Çatalhöyük liked eating; sleeping, having sex, and attaching to others. These activities made them feel good. They were also aware of the loss of these pleasurable activities and of death.

This caused bad, troublesome feelings. When the activities that create good secure feelings are not possible all people have negative. angry and aggressive feelings. As a result they sometimes represent them, in an attempt to master or control the threatening aspects of their existence.

I also thought of the people of Çatalhöyük struggling with conflicted feelings about increased dependence and increased population density. I saw wall paintings of many hands close together. Perhaps helping hands but too many hands seem overwhelming. Many hands are needed for agriculture, cooking, building, child care, hunting and domestication of animals in an untamed land. But people also need to be tamed to be able to live and work close together. There is not time here but I agree that the house or Domas (Hodder’s conceptualization) was used to contain people’s emotions. The double walls, rather than shared walls, I think stress the idea of being close but the need to also be separate.

There are two related psychological processes that may be useful to us. 1) introjection the taking in other’s feeling, and 2) projection, assuming that others feel as we do The situations we experience are external but are taken into the self. This double process of introjection and projection contributes to the interaction between the external and internal worlds. So an adult’s judgement of reality is never free of internal influences. The mother forms the first model of the world. If she is loving, this will become part of the infant’s internal world. Later it will be easier for the child to relate to others. Sometimes to preserve the "good breast", or mother the infant splits off the aggressive feelings and projects them on to something or someone else. As we mature. we "work through" and "integrate" our feelings. Individuals learn to love people in spite of their faults and the world is no longer seen in terms of black and white. We work towards a sense of related autonomy.

Now imagine the. fears that could accompany depending on crops to reappear and cattle to reproduce when you have settled and given up, at least to some extent, mobility to go in search of food. The people of Çatalhöyük had some "working though" to do: They wanted to be settled and have more material goods but this required them to live closer together and have control over their impulses, much as a mother does. They had to develop practice over time to tame themselves.

This leads us back again to the female figurines. I think the female nurturing model was known and useful to a society experimenting with, or developing cultural belief s that would support their expanding settlement and need to contain their emotions.

The Haalands, Norwegian Archaeologists, also came to the conclusion that the non-verbal expressions at Çatalhöyük were based on the mother-child experience. I was excited to know that we came to this conclusion quite independently. Also independently, I started to wonder, about heads being removed from human skeletons, cattle heads, those headless stick figures on the walls with the vultures and again one of the female figurines has a reconstructed head. Later I learned from Naomi Hamilton’s very careful consideration of Mellaart’s data that removed heads were a pattern that I had only suspected. Freud’s nephew was angry that his mother was leaving him - he pushed the spool away. If he was living at Çatalhöyük he might have broken the female figures head off. But then he felt afraid and sad to have destroyed his symbolic mother. Remember we tend to think that objects have feelings similar to our own …animism. He then wanted to put the head back on and bring her back to life, like he pulled the spool back. If you kill an animal or plant you are happy to be able to cat. However, you may also feel sad or worried that animals, plants or clay figures may feel badly or be angry. When the real animal is killed it can no longer reproduce or produce milk for you. Domestication would be a psychological compromise. They could have their cattle and eat it too. It is comforting to be able to do and undo your impulsive emotions - this is not limited to childhood. Naomi Hamilton showed me a figurine that had a dowel hole that would make the removal and replacement of a head easy. This "working though" process is safer when projected onto material representations and not acted out with, your cattle, mother or neighbors.

In conclusion I am proposing that a parallel and facilitating process of projection and interjection also takes place with inanimate objects. If an aggressive or libidinal drive is particularly strong it is projected onto a safer passive thing that can be controlled. This is a way to externalize and make distressing emotions more concrete and manageable.

Knowingly and unknowingly individuals create symbols to contain internal conflict. Culture is a shared package of these "defenses tricks" or protective mechanisms. The people at Çatalhöyük had emotional conflicts and they, like all of us, worked out wavs to displace their positive and negative feeling,-, onto objects and images. Representations were created to defend them from anger and fear and help them gain positive feelings toward themselves and others.

Images can give people a sense of well being especially if the illusions are shared. Several of the representations are found in many Çatalhöyük dwellings over a long period demonstrating that the symbols were shared. That Is not to say that symbols and their meaning never change over time - that is obviously not the case. But there are evolving webs of meaning. I think, often based on the mother-child relationship.

The detailed meanings of these symbolic representation at Çatalhöyük will be explored in the years to come as more contextual information is learned.

The ideas that have been presented to you have been my first attempt to integrate drive theory, developmental theories, ego psychology, and object relations theory to archaeological artifacts.