Vol 9 No.2/99

Freud in New York


In the comment book at the Library of Congress, one visitor wrote: "I wish all the U.S. senators would see this exhibit." With a rich cultural program, the exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture at the Jewish Museum is likely to cause a stir in New York as well.


The exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, which was first shown at the Library of Congress in 1998, will be traveling to New York City this spring. From April 18 to September 9, the Jewish Museum will host the biggest Freud exhibition ever.

Few figures have wielded as decisive and fundamental an influence on the course of modern cultural history as Sigmund Freud. He shaped our notions of childhood, sexuality, identity, and memory. Succeeding generations of scholars have advanced human knowledge either on the basis of his teachings or in opposition to his tenets. However, Freud not only formulated general theories on psychology. He also examined the roots of anti-Semitism and his own identity as a Jew, which caused just as much controversy as his fundamental ideas on human psychology.

The Library of Congress, from which most items on display are drawn, owns the biggest Freud collection in the world. While the National Socialists temporarily purged Freud's name from the annals of history in Germany in the 1940s, the psychoanalyst Kurt R. Eissler started a comprehensive Freud Collection in New York. In 1951, Eissler's collection was housed in the Library of Congress and has grown in size ever since. Freud's daughter Anna also left almost all of her father's manuscripts to the Freud Archives in Washington, D.C.

The Vienna Freud Museum has tried to inform the German-speaking public about Freud's work since 1971. Compared to Washington and London, its holdings are much smaller, but as one of the first institutions in Germany and Austria, it started to build a systematic collection on Freud and early psychoanalysis in the early 1970s. The museum has striven to fill the void that Freud's expulsion left in Austria by cherishing the memory of the founding father of psychoanalysis and stimulating a new discussion of his work and psychoanalysis as a whole. That is why a permanent exhibit and an archive of texts, images, and sounds were installed in Freud's former consulting room and apartment. These archives now hold several thousands of records. In addition, a library was set up to keep abreast of new publications in the field of psychoanalysis in various languages. A wide variety of books and documents was donated to Vienna by Anna Freud, Kurt R. Eissler, and many other émigré psychoanalysts. In the 1970s Vienna, gathering materials on Sigmund Freud was quite an inexpensive endeavor - antiquarian booksellers in Vienna sold dedicated volumes from Freud's library at ridiculously low prices. This situation changed quickly, however. Today, the museum can only make a selected number of new acquisitions with governmental and private support. In view of this fact, gifts and donations from estates, such as a collection of drawings and paintings by his famous case study, the "Wolfman," which the museum received in 1997, become all the more important.

While the London Freud Museum made many of Freud's antiques, such as the rug on the famous couch and Freud's analyst chair, available to the exhibition, the Vienna Freud Museum loaned documents from the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association and several objects from Freud's private life to Conflict and Culture. The Sigmund Freud Association of Vienna will also facilitate the showing of the exhibition in the city. Visitors will be able to see it at the Sigmund Freud Museum and at the Austrian National Library from October 21, 1999 to February 6, 2000. Conceived in Washington and displayed in New York, Conflict and Culture has traveled the same path that the psychoanalytic movement took to anchor itself in the consciousness of the German-speaking region. In Europe, psychoanalysis is primarily viewed as an American phenomenon today. Numerous clippings from Hollywood movies such as Psycho, Marnie, and Vertigo, which are shown in the exhibition, attest to the popularity of the movement in the United States. The fact that most visitors to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna hail from the United States is another telling sign. Scholars often tend to overlook that the reason why psychoanalysis had to return to Austria from America is primarily rooted in twentieth-century history. The exhibition will shed light on this fact and heighten awareness in Austria.

In New York, various lectures, discussions and cultural events will further delve into Freud's work. On April 27 the eminent historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi of Columbia University will examine Freud's relationship to Judaism and to his own Jewish identity. To address this question, Professor Yerushalmi will present an evening of readings from Freud's letters and writings.

On May 4, various panelists from American universities will discuss the ways that Freud's legacy has both shaped and reflected modern and post-modern culture. Topics will include the link between Freud's work and earlier views of the self as well as the impact of psychoanalysis on theories of personal freedom and the individuality of the mind.

Ever since Freud published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905, a joke has never been just a joke. Like his related work on dreams, Freud's book on jokes opened the door to deeper meanings of everyday experiences. A panel on May 11 will explore how Freud's work illuminates strategic uses of humor and will also examine the intimate connection of Freud's work on jokes to the rich tradition of Yiddish humor, as well as to his own Jewish upbringings.

In a rare New York engagement on May 13, members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform pieces played in Freud's musical Vienna, i.e., chamber music by Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. Strauss's exquisite Sextet from Capriccio represents the apotheosis of the late-romantic ideal. In fact, while Strauss flirted briefly with modernism, his style remained true to the sensibilities of an earlier age throughout his long career. Schoenberg, on the other hand, was Strauss's polar opposite. Though an early adherent of traditions extended by Strauss, he became as groundbreaking and controversial as Freud. Schoenberg's pivotal, post-romantic masterpiece, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) finds the composer on the brink of a breakthrough. There after, a Straussian aesthetic he demonstrated in this piece would be abandoned for challenging uncharted territory. These two works, especially when heard in juxtaposition, exemplify the musical essence of "conflict and culture."

Women played critically important roles in Freud's private life, his clinical practice, and his theories. While psychoanalysis has inspired charges of sexism, it has also been lauded for its positive impact on women. A panel discussion on June 15 will examine the women in Freud's life - his relatives, colleagues and patients - and the influence of his work on women's lives, including the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, and the emergence of women as major psychoanalytic clinicians and theorists.

Four programs of outstanding recent movies from around the world - each functioning as a cinematic "case history" - will illustrate how Freud's theories influenced film making. On July 7 the Austrian film Young Doctor Freud (1976) will open the series. Called up from the past, the title character submits to a television-style interview, mixed with re-creations of events in his early life: from childhood in Moravia through his studies, marriage, and first use of the psychoanalytic method. Brilliantly evoking the period's texture through the use of authentic settings, Young Doctor Freud sheds light on crucial topics, including the influence of anti-Semitism on Freud's development.

On July 14, Atom Egoyan's early work Family Viewing (1987) shows how the Oedipus complex goes electronic, as a young man in Toronto becomes hilariously, stupefyingly caught up in a tangle of sexualized home appliances. This film by the Oscar-nominated director of The Sweet Hereafter has been praised for its oddball humor and sense of contemporary corruption.

In Benoit Jacquot's Seventh Heaven (1996), to be shown on July 28, a young woman in present-day Paris suffers from classic symptoms of hysteria - until a nameless doctor cures her through hypnosis. But as she gets better, her previously complacent husband falls apart.

Two acclaimed non-narrative films, whose makers (like Freud) pay attention to the teasing, enigmatic play between words and images, will be shown on August 4. Andrei Zagdansky's Interpretation of Dreams (1991) is a film from the glasnost era, when Freud's theories emerged in the Soviet Union after more than sixty years of censorship. Making a deadpan presentation of this late "discovery," Zagdansky applies it to old films, treating them as the collective "dreams" of a nation. Sink or Swim (1990) by the American director Su Friedrich explores the filmmaker's relationship with her father, narrated in alphabetized segments such as "Virginity," "Seduction" and "Quicksand." As droll as it is heartbreaking, Sink or Swim lays bare one family's story in all its specificity, while evoking a generic American 1950s, filtered through the childhood lens of magical thinking.

For more information on all these events and the exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture please contact the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York or see the calendar section.