After emigrating to London late in his life, Sigmund Freud rejected a request to donate his papers to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, saying: “I have a probably unjustifiable antipathy to personal relics, autographs, collections of handwriting specimens, and everything that springs from these. This goes so far that I have, for example, handed all my manuscripts before 1905 into the wastebasket.” Nevertheless, a startlingly large amount of material has survived, and Freud has become one of the most studied figures of the 20th century.
Here in the United States, the Library of Congress established a Sigmund Freud Collection in 1942 and, in the years since, has assembled the world’s pre-eminent archive of material written and owned by Freud, as well as material about him and his work. The collection includes books, letters, photographs, oral histories, home movies, and more than 50,000 manuscripts. The last of those records in the collection that have been closed to researchers -- to protect patients and others -- are scheduled to be opened in 2000. To commemorate that event, the library announced in 1993 that it would mount a major exhibition on Freud. After much controversy, “Freud: Conflict and Culture” finally opened in Washington this fall. During the next two years, it is scheduled to travel to New York City, Vienna, Los Angeles, and to Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre, in Brazil.
With the decision to mount an exhibition on Freud, the Library of Congress had to face the question of how to present and represent him and his legacy. Should it examine the professional (public) Freud, the concealed (private) Freud, or the revealed (interpreted) Freud? And what role should it attribute to Freud in light of the continuing dispute over the efficacy of his method?
As plans for the library’s exhibition neared completion in 1995, a petition, initiated by the independent scholar Frank Swales and signed by approximately 50 psychoanalysts and scholars, called for revisions. “The ultimate division in the Freud controversy,” quipped Frank Cioffi, a philosopher at the University of Kent, “is between those who would be happy to purchase a used car from Freud or his advocates and those who would not.” Pleading the need to raise more money for the exhibit, library officials postponed the opening and moved to involve some of the critics in planning the exhibition and its accompanying publication.
The result is an important project. Freud’s ideas have played a critical role in 20th-century conceptions of self. At the same time, questions about the efficacy and verifiability of psychoanalysis, as well as the validity of a method based on work with patients from a narrow, bourgeois group -- have led to widespread challenges to his framework. Those include claims that Freudian analysis is a pseudoscience that cannot be shown to work and a patriarchal system that defines women as sexually deficient. For some people, the exhibition will be deemed successful only to the degree that it evaluates Freud’s psychoanalytic method.
But beyond the psychoanalytic debates lies the broader question of whether intellectual history can be successfully communicated through the medium of a museum exhibition. Do the complex, theoretical, and essentially non-visual categories of human personality and intellectual debate lend themselves to a three-dimensional medium? Must any translation of abstract concepts into a graphic and popular medium constitute a distortion and a betrayal? Using Freud’s ideas of the unconscious and their impact on society as its subject matter, the library’s installation offers an opportunity to answer those questions.
“Freud: Conflict and Culture” is the largest exhibition of Freud materials yet made available to the public. On view in the Library of Congress’s galleries are many original manuscripts, first editions, unique artifacts from Freud’s study and consulting room, and historical photographs from the library’s collection, the Freud Museum in London, and the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. Despite the range of materials, however, this is basically an exhibition of two-dimensional paper materials -- intended not “to determine whether the answers [Freud] gave were correct,” as the exhibit’s curator, Michael S. Roth, has noted, “but how his ideas influenced the 20th century.”
The overarching narrative of the exhibition traces the development of Freud’s theories from his formative years, through the consolidation of his theories into the therapeutic analyses of individuals, to the embodiment of the psychoanalytic method in a profession and as a form of social commentary.
Given this traditional content and presentation, I found myself surprised by the compelling nature of the exhibition. It succeeds in documenting the evolution of Freud’s theories, in presenting his patients sympathetically, and in demonstrating the relevance of Freudian concepts in our contemporary life. But it does even more. Although neither Freud’s original manuscripts nor the death mask of the “Wolf Man” -- one of his famous patients -- captured my imagination, I found myself drawn into the flow of the exhibition, captivated by the display of the increasingly complex concepts of Freud’s psychoanalytic model.
The genius of the installation lies in the way it playfully reveals and re-creates elements of Freud’s analytic method. Organized around a spine of small, discrete bays, in which case studies and theoretical works provide the backdrop, the structure of the exhibition reflects the intimacy and rigor of the analytic experience. Each bay’s discussion of a key Freudian concept -- repression, transference, sexuality, aggression -- is followed (and the next bay is foreshadowed) by a video monitor displaying clips of psychoanalytic scenes from movies and television. Psychoanalytic tropes culled from popular culture -- from Wilma Flintstone undergoing hypnosis to the free associations that reveal the inner lives of Maxwell Smart and Hitchcock’s Marnie -- reveal our shared identity as subjects of psychoanalysis, undergoing continual pseudoanalysis via film and television.
The exhibition’s designers, the firm of Chermayeff and Geismar, subtly demonstrate the relationships between the cerebral allusiveness of Freud’s theories and the visual explicitness of film and television culture. History punctuates the present, and theory confronts everyday experience, as viewers are helped to juxtapose the interpretive nuances of analysis with the facile, extroverted nature of our media-saturated world.
The design also creates a complex web of conversations. Patients talk to Freud, Freud writes to colleagues and the public, critics and commentators reflect on Freud, the exhibition narrator talks to us about Freud, and we respond to the film and television segments. High on the gallery walls, a ribbon of quotations from Freud, his critics, and various commentators runs throughout the exhibition, giving visual expression to our conflicted emotions about analysis itself. Those remarks, printed in light ink over a gray background (suggesting hushed conversations), from varied discussions, time periods, and points of view, illuminate the conflicts generated -- and revealed -- in our culture by Freud’s theories.
The underlying point is to focus the viewer’s attention on the therapeutic experience. It is revealing to compare the Library of Congress’s installation with an exhibition jointly mounted in 1989 by the University Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Freud Museum in London. “The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past” opened with a life-size photograph of Freud’s study in his house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, in London, complemented by several of his prints of archaeological sites. Viewers then proceeded to pristine cases containing 67 antiquities from Freud’s own collection.
Photographs of Freud with this material demonstrated his awareness of antiquity and his familiarity, and engagement, with the specific artifacts on view. He had begun collecting ancient figurative art at the same time he undertook his investigations of the inner workings of the mind. Just as he searched for psychological truths, Freud was careful to collect authentic pieces in a market brimming with replicas and forgeries.
Many of the same artifacts appear in the new Library of Congress exhibition, including Egyptian figurines and Greek pottery, but here they take on very different meanings. A bronze statue of Athena, for example, is no longer on a pedestal in a display case, but stands amid printed materials on the case of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an American expatriate poet who underwent analysis by Freud from 1933 to 1934. In her memoir Tribute to Freud (also on view), Doolittle noted Freud’s remark about the statue (presumably intended to apply also to herself): “She is perfect, only she has lost her spear.” Freud’s pronouncement on the imperfection of the goddess echoed his understanding of women as eternally injured by the “loss” of a penis. Beside the Athena statue are a Man Ray photograph of H.D. and one of several letters she wrote to Freud.
In this setting, the goddess of wisdom and war becomes one of many elements in the interplay between the worlds of Freud and of his patient. In comparison with the earlier exhibition, the Library of Congress has taken Athena off her pedestal. Set literally in the midst of the therapeutic exchanges between patient and analyst, the figure embodies both the ambiguity and the promise of Freud’s legacy.
The structure of the exhibition creates meanings in other ways as well. A re-creation of Freud’s study appears in a large Plexiglas cube between the section of the exhibit that discusses the development of Freud’s theories and the section that addresses their dissemination in society. One side of that cube presents a view of Freud’s desk -- complete with his eyeglasses, a vellum-covered notebook, and a selection of his antiquities. The other side reflects the view from the patient’s perspective, centered on a mockup of a couch covered with Freud’s Persian rug and a print of the Egyptian temple at Abu Simbel that hung over his consulting couch.
The rich textures of those original materials and the explicit separation of the two sides provide a nuanced view of the analyst/analysand experience. In the 1989 exhibit, the picture of the study introduced visitors to Freud’s antiquities and emphasized their provenance and historical context; in the Library of Congress’s installation, the study appears in the middle of the narrative, symbolizing the centrality of the therapeutic experience and suggesting the impact of analysis on the individual and society.
With its constant evocation of popular culture, the exhibit demonstrates the continued significance of Freud to our everyday lives. The thematic movement from the focus on the individual (seen through the lens of Freud’s theories about the individual in the first half of the exhibition) to the role of psychoanalytic knowledge in society (detailed in material on the creation of the psychoanalytic movement and Freud’s writings on political and cultural issues) parallels the desire of a person undergoing analysis to apply the insights gained from therapy to his or her dealings with the external world.
Viewing “Freud: Conflict and Culture” is an intensely intimate experience precisely because the organizers have incorporated components of the therapeutic process into the visitor’s engagement with the materials. The composition of the exhibition -- the labels, artifacts, re-created environments, juxtaposed words and images integrated within the physical structure of the space through which the visitor moves -- succeeds in presenting the richness and complexity of intellectual debate.
The structure of the exhibit also gives the viewer a new realization of the coherence and contradictions of Freud’s ideas. From an elucidation of psychoanalytic concepts, the exhibition moves first through Freud’s role in the development of the psychoanalytic profession and then to his pronouncements on the social disorders associated with fascism and the rise of the Nazis. The suggestion is that untreated personal neuroses lead to large-scale political conflicts.
As to Freud himself, the man who emerges is both humane and conflicted -- a man who confronted his repressed Judaism only when Nazi persecution of Jews forced him to confront it; a man who truly did not understand what women want. (The exhibition describes his treatment of “Dora” -- Hilda Bauer -- as a “botched case,” and Freud himself wrote later in his life that female sexuality “is extraordinarily obscure to me.”) These characteristics are noted in the exhibition, but they do not distract from its primary focus on how Freud’s theories have shaped 20th-century views of self and personality.
It is fitting that Freud is given the final word. As viewers reach the end of the exhibition, they encounter a photograph of Freud sitting in front of a microphone in his London study, nine months before his death in 1939. Words, cascading from a loudspeaker mounted above the exhibit case, project compassion and empathy, even though the actual phrases seem indecipherable. Adjacent to the photograph is a printed statement from Freud summarizing his life and the rise of psychoanalysis: “I discovered some new and important facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psycho-analysis. ... I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an international psycho-analytic association. But the struggle is not over.”
While reading that statement, I gradually recognized the heavily accented, garbled tones issuing from the loudspeaker. As if from a dream, Freud’s voice suddenly emerged from the babel of language -- speaking the words that I was reading. The crackling recording of Freud’s frail voice brought temporary clarity to ideas whose often-muffled resonances continue to sound in our times.
Robert I. Goler is executive administrator of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. His reviews of exhibitions have appeared in The Public Historian, The Journal of American History, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. “Freud: Conflict and Culture” will be at the Library of Congress through January 16 and at the Jewish Museum, in New York City, from April 18 through September 9, 1999.
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