Magazine: Civilization, August/September 1998

THE FREUD FILES

WHEN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DECIDED TO put on a Sigmund Freud exhibition, a fuss could have been anticipated--and a fuss there was. Freud is a demode giant so out of step with the modern tempo that the banshees scream whenever his image is shown or his name is spoken. Not only is he viewed in some circles as the man who made sex public and love unromantic, he is your archetypal dead European white man. Yet the Library's decision was fitting as well as brave, as it is the single largest repository for Freud's papers and those of his daughter, Anna. The Library's Freud collection--on view in the Jefferson Building's Northwest Gallery from October 15 to January 16, 1999--ranges from 50,000 manuscripts to thousands of photographs to home movies and other items.

None of which makes Freud's whiteness less white or his Europeanness less European. His writings reveal him to be undeviatingly monocultural, an elitist who leaned on German philosophy and drew from Greek art and mythology to fashion the allegories that were the building blocks of his thought. "It's clear from reading Freud," writes E. Ann Kaplan in the exhibition's catalog, "how steeped he was in high culture and in the great books of the Western canon. Less obvious is his scorn for mass culture, for the Kitschik, as he would no doubt have called it." How un-us can a guy be?

Not surprisingly, the exhibition's curator, Michael Roth, says, "There was some controversy raised by people who call themselves revisionists, many of whom think of Freud's influence as pernicious and that an exhibition on him is a kind of honor and should not be what the Library of Congress engages in. They circulated a petition that was signed by many important scholars, asking that the Library do a fair exhibition on Freud. I would have signed the darn thing myself, and then I realized I was thc target of it."

Roth, associate director of the Getty Research Institute for History of Art and the Humanities, has been at great pains to play this one straight down the middle--if not in the exhibit itself, which constitutes a more or less factual narrative without much editorial comment, then in the catalog, where the views and voices are varied and sometimes not a little discordant. As Roth says, "I've had people come up to me and say, 'I can't believe you have an essay by this guy in there. He's so anti-Freudian,' and somebody else'll come up and say, 'I can't believe an essay by that guy He's so pro-Freudian or she's so pro-Freudian.' It makes me feel I'm on the right track."

Whatever one's opinions on the man and his work, his imprint on daily life in America--a nation he looked on with some distaste--is still profound. Though he may not have loved us, at least for the fifty years after his first appearance here in 1909, we loved him, or at least we took to his ideas.

In the years immediately after the Second World War, Freud was standard fare in American medical schools, but his influence in medical psychiatry has long since waned. The rich allegories Freud used to delineate the workings of the self or the soul have been somewhat abandoned in favor of psychopharmacology, which uses drugs, not talk, to treat patients. "We're moving," says a not untroubled Roth, "from a model of a human being as someone who has memory of some kind, which gives him a definition of his individual self, to a view of the human self as being constituted by a certain combination of chemicals."

Say what you will of Freud--his understanding of the human being was loaded with dramatic meaning and moral values. Psychopharmacology throws the burden of finding meaning and value back on the individual and his or her culture(s). This therapy may prove too bracing for many people. At some level or other, a view of the human as a vast congeries of amino acids is just not very helpful. Freud will continue to be of interest to men and women of a speculative, novelistic or theatrical turn of mind.

As therapy, however, the talking cure is often considered too costly and time consuming to be of use to most people suffering from distempers of the soul. At one time, more was expected of psychoanalysis than that it serve as a scratching session for rich people with spiritual eczema. Robert Coles, writing in the exhibition catalog, quotes Grete Bibring, a member of what he calls "the Freud circle" of Vienna: "There was this larger world out there that many of us worried about, and we hoped to change it, and we thought of psychoanalysis as part of social and political progress, not only intellectual progress. We hoped that schools and hospitals and the prisons and the universities--we thought our knowledge would change those institutions."

Now, however, the institutions rely on psychoactive drugs, not for treatment but for behavior "modification." And not just institutions: There are days when I have the impression every other person I meet is taking Prozac or some other mood-altering chemical preparation. Yet the use of these drugs cannot be entirely deplored, as there is no doubt that they are lifesavers for many We know that they can do quickly what months and years of the talking cure can't.

Even so, the talking cure is still with us in the multiple, mass-produced versions of it, which go under the general name of "therapy." Most of the thousands of therapists plying their trade today are not Freudians. There are so many of them, of whatever level of training or even literacy, it's impossible to know the kind or quality of service this industry provides its customers. All of them, however, whether they know it or not, have been influenced by the Viennese medical man, dead now for almost 60 years.

If we draw up a list of words and phrases with a Freudian tincture that educated and not-so-educated people use, it's obvious how much this man's thinking has shaped our own. "He created a vocabulary that was truly extraordinary," Roth says, justly. "What's science, what isn't science, what is appropriate sexual expression and what isn't, what does it mean to be self controlled rather than repressed. Ail these things are going on anyway, but they get expressed in a language of psychoanalysis and that makes a difference. It changes the way people think and talk about certain things that remain of great interest."

There was a time when collegiate males could browbeat collegiate females into bed by accusing the women of being repressed. You can't get away with that kind of heavy handed use of Freudian notions any more, but when one Freudian idea seems to lose its power, another gains currency Certainly recovered memory a Freudoid of little importance half a century ago when repression was in fashion, has now gained such a hold over us that we convict people in the law courts on the strength of suddenly discovered recollections.

One Freudian idea that people hold to now with greater certainty is the existence of the unconscious. You can get into an argument any day of the week about whether and what kind of souls humans may possess, but the unconscious--this belief in a shadowy, darker but powerful self--is taken for granted. We know that it is not God or inhabitants of the spirit world which come to us at night, but the shapes and shades escaped from the murky depths of ourselves.

In our time, Freud is often handed the blame for the various forms of self-indulgent hedonism that supposedly corrode the very paper the social contract is written on. Freud himself would have been repulsed to see his teaching put in the service of a personal, amoral and substantially meaningless anarchism. Once upon a time, he did represent a form of personal liberation. But that time has passed.

By the 1970s, his daughter Anna was trying to make it clear that Freudian psychology also addresses itself to what happens when the brakes and the steering wheel stop working: "In the early years of psychoanalysis we could take the Super-Ego for granted; it was there, a big presence in the lives of our analysands. Now, that is not always so---now many of us are almost surprised when we meet someone who wants to be analyzed and is driven by a stern conscience that won't let go. Now it is the instincts that are--how is it put these days?--all over the place, with no voice within saying no, no, or maybe I should say, a mere whisper compared to the past."

As Karl Marx is not to blame for Joseph Stalin, so Freud ought not to get the rap for our piggeries, our social panics and personal turmoils. By now we should have reached the point that we can consider him the remarkable and original thinker that he was. The exhibition will underscore the contested legacies of Freud's psychoanalysis. The point is not whether Freud was correct in his specific claims, but to show the pervasiveness of his approach to finding meaning through an exploration of concealed wishes.