Following is an article by the curator of a new major Library exhibition, "Freud: Conflict and Culture." The exhibition features more than 170 vintage photographs, prints, films, manuscript letters, documents and first editions of many publications from the Library's collection of more than 80,000 Freud items, primarily donated over the past four decades by the Sigmund Freud Archives. These materials are supplemented with loans from the Freud Museum in London, the Sigmund Freud-Museum in Vienna and other important collections. A review panel of leading scholars and consultants in the fields of cultural and intellectual history and psychoanalysis helped shape the exhibition. View the exhibition online.
Few figures have had so decisive and fundamental an influence on modern cultural history as has Sigmund Freud. Yet few figures also have inspired such sustained controversy and intense debate.
Freud with his mother, Amalia, in her apartment in Vienna, May 5, 1925
Freud's legacy continues to be hotly contested. Our notions of identity, memory, childhood, sexuality and, most generally, of meaning have been shaped in relation to, and often in opposition to, Freud's work. This exhibition, having attracted controversy even before its opening, examines Freud's life and his key ideas and their effect upon the 20th century.
The exhibition features vintage photographs, prints, manuscripts and first editions. Also displayed are home movies of Freud and objects from his study and consulting room -- including materials from his desk, the chair in which he sat when listening to patients, a model of his consulting couch, and pieces from his own collection of antiquities. Selected film and television clips, and materials from newspapers, magazines and comic books are interwoven throughout the exhibition to highlight the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis on popular culture.
The exhibition is composed of three major sections: "Formative Years," begins in late-19th century Vienna, the milieu of Freud's early professional development. "The Individual: Therapy and Theory" examines key psychoanalytic concepts and how Freud used them in some of his most famous cases. "From the Individual to Society" focuses on the diffusion of psychoanalytic ideas and Freud's speculations about the origins of society, the social functions of religion and art and how crises reveal fundamental aspects of human nature. Throughout the exhibition words and images, often contentious, sometimes humorous, attest to the impact of Freud's ideas on the 20th century.
Formative Years
Freud (seventh from left) during his only visit to the United States in a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909. Carl Jung stands to the right of him. - courtesy of the Freud Museum
Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in the small town of Freiberg, now part of the Czech Republic. In 1860, the family settled in Vienna, where Sigmund, as he came to call himself, received an education emphasizing classical literature and philosophy -- an education that would serve him well in developing his theories and conveying them to a wide audience. The cultural ferment, ethnic tensions and class conflict of fin-de-siècle Vienna were part of Freud's daily existence. The city was a hothouse for radical innovations in politics, philosophy and the arts. Freud chose to concentrate on research in neurology, a field in which the frontiers of knowledge were changing dramatically. Eventually, financial concerns led him to pursue clinical work with patients. His analyses of patients and of himself became the chief sources for his professional writings.
The Individual: Therapy and Theory
Like many doctors, writers and philosophers working at the end of the 19th century, Freud grew increasingly interested in the unconscious. He saw the unconscious as a dimension of human life at once inaccessible and important as a source of thoughts and actions. In his efforts to decipher the meanings of hysterical symptoms and other neglected mental phenomena that seemed beyond conscious control (dreams, slips of the tongue), Freud moved further away from his neurological training. Committed to the idea that such apparently meaningless behavior actually expressed unconscious conflict, he developed techniques for determining what the behavior might mean. This section of the exhibition -- divided into six parts -- introduces some of Freud's most famous patients and the key concepts he used to try to make sense of their symptoms and their lives.
Anna O. -- Hypnosis to Free Association
Freud's interest in what lay beyond conscious life and in hypnotism and hysteria led him to study with the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. When Freud returned to Vienna, he began using hypnosis, massage and pressure on the head to get patients to dredge up thoughts related to their symptoms. Only later did he ask them to say whatever crossed their minds. This he called free association, what the patient called Anna O. had already labeled the "talking cure."
Sergei Pankejeff, the "Wolf Man" (right) and his family in Odessa
Rat Man, Wolf Man - Interpretation
For Freud, interpretation was necessary to give meaning to the apparently random thoughts of free association. Freud's focus was on reading the obscure language of the unconscious, and he developed techniques of interpretation in order to do so. In the cases known as Rat Man and Wolf Man, he wove together elaborate stories, explanations and speculations to make sense out of constellations of symptoms that seemed impossibly puzzling. These case histories, written for colleagues, read like detective novels in which the analyst deciphers the significance of symptoms as if they are clues.
Dora and H.D. -- Transference
Freud used the concepts of transference and countertransference to refer to the strong emotions that are projected by the patient onto the doctor and the doctor onto the patient. A transference -- such as treating an analyst like one's father -- might promote therapeutic work, but Freud was also aware that this could distort a patient's (and an analyst's) perspective. Given that an analysis might seem successful entirely because it felt that way, Freud (and his critics) wanted to know how to determine if it had in fact produced true insight. This influence of patient/doctor emotions on analysis has been key to understanding the cases of Ida Bauer, whom Freud called Dora, and the poet Hilda Doolittle, who called herself H.D.
Dreams and Everyday Life
Freud understood dreams (like jokes, slips of the tongue, and other symptoms) to be signs of concealed, conflicting desires. He considered powerful desires to be always in conflict, and his theories tried to account for how these conflicts give rise to unintentional expression. Dreams and other unconscious acts conceal even as they reveal wishes that we would rather not face more directly.
A portrait of Sigmund Freud by Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1926. - courtesy of the Freud Museum, London.
Repression
Repression is Freud's term for the mechanism that turns our unacceptable desires away from us. These unruly desires are repressed and made inaccessible to our thinking. The unconscious and, later, the id, are the names Freud used for this realm of inaccessibility. Our repressed desires, according to psychoanalysis, only appear to us disguised as dreams, symptoms and other seemingly incoherent, uncontrolled actions.
Sex and Aggression
For Freud, sexual desires conflict with one another, with social conventions and, most critically, with reality. He saw them as fundamental, yet never fully satisfied. We desire what we do not have or what we feel we have lost, and these unsatisfied desires find expression in the surprising, sometimes disturbing, ways.
After World War I, Freud paid increasing attention to the phenomenon of aggression. He speculated that a death drive was as important as the sexual instinct in our psychic constitutions. He saw the basic conflict in our lives as that between Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death -- a conflict never to be resolved, but one that has fateful consequences in daily life and in world events.
"From the Individual to Society"
As Freud's sphere of inquiry expanded to include the basic questions of moral and political life, he inspired intellectuals and artists to take his theories about conflict, desire and the unconscious into new areas. These ideas seemed to many to open promising new avenues for understanding the successes and failures of modern society. Others thought that these routes led straight to deception or worse.
In the first part of this section, the exhibition presents artifacts from the professional expansion of psychoanalysis and the critical reaction to that expansion. Next, the exhibition examines Freud's theories of society, from his speculation on its origins to his views of the contemporary world. The violent crises that shook the world at the end of Freud's life are the subject of the final part of this section.
Freud's famous analytic couch
Expansion and Criticism
The vigorous expansion of psychoanalysis in Freud's own lifetime -- from the early days of his Wednesday Society in Vienna to the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association -- was accompanied and challenged by criticism equally vigorous. As he sought to protect his ideas through institutionalization and theoretical orthodoxy, analysts with whom he disagreed were sometimes treated as dissidents or even heretics. As psychoanalysis rapidly spread within medicine (especially in the United States) and to other forms of therapy, the social sciences, art, literature, and popular culture, the criticisms of Freud's ideas and his practices kept pace. In the face of controversy Freud was mindful of creating and controlling his intellectual legacy. He attempted to do this in writings about the origins of his own concepts and of the movement he founded.
Origins
Freud saw that society creates mechanisms to ensure social control of human instincts. At the root of these controlling mechanisms, he thought, is the prohibition against incest. He further speculated that this taboo had its genesis in the guilt stemming from the murder of a powerful patriarch. After the tyrannical father is killed, the sons continue to follow the dictates with which they had always lived. For Freud, the past is not something that can be outgrown by either the individual or society but rather is something that remains a vital and often disruptive part of existence. The emphasis on history as being alive in the present is a central theme in psychoanalytic approaches to the individual and society.
Freud en route to exile in London, with Princess Marie Bonaparte and William Bullitt, Paris, June 13, 1938
Problems of Culture
Freud understood culture, as he did dreams and symptoms, as an expression of desires in conflict with one another and with society. Religion, art and science could be richly rewarding. But he emphasized that culture is the product of impulses denied a more directly sexual or aggressive satisfaction. If these cultural practices fail to alleviate the conflicts at the heart of the human psyche, what then, Freud asked, are the consequences for the individual? If forms of social life fail to meet basic psychological needs, what are the social consequences of these unfulfilled desires? These remained for Freud the vital questions about the relation between civilization and ourselves.
Crises
Freud thought that social life originated in unresolvable conflicts and, hence, that civilization was always vulnerable to radical disruptions. From World War I until his death in 1939, he witnessed increasingly violent social crises that he took to be irrational "symptoms" of these primal conflicts. Seemingly senseless wars, escalating antisemitism and the threat of Nazi domination were all interpreted by Freud in terms of his model of psychological conflict.
Epilogue
Freud's thinking emerged in the wake of Marx and Darwin and developed in a century in which violent conflicts reached unheard-of dimensions. The conflicts that Freud stressed were within the psyche: people at war with themselves and sometimes with the cultural authorities they had internalized. But he thought that the way we managed (or failed to manage) those conflicts had everything to do with the explosions of violence that marked the modern world. Although much has changed since Freud first formulated his theories, today's concern with the violent power of sexuality and aggression has only intensified. Freud did not propose solutions to how one might escape this violence. Instead, his writings on the connection of culture and conflict identified fundamental problems for the twentieth century -- problems that show no sign of disappearing as we move into the twenty-first.
The manuscript of Freud's interview statement taped for the BBC, Dec. 7, 1933, and a photo of the recording session. He spoke of his life and work and closed by stating that "the struggle is not yet over."
"Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" was organized by the Library of Congress, in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud-Museum in Vienna and the Freud Museum, London.
The Library of Congress, in cooperation with Alfred A. Knopf, has published a companion book in conjunction with the exhibition that comprises a wide range of views about psychoanalysis and its place in contemporary culture. Contributors include Harold Blum, José Brunner, Frank Cioffi, Robert Coles, Hannah Decker, Muriel Dimen, John Forrester, Peter Gay, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Adolf Grunbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, Peter Kramer, Edith Kurzweil, Patrick Mahony, Michael Molnar, Michael Roth, Oliver Sacks, Art Spiegelman and John Toews.
Funding for this exhibition was provided by Discovery Communications Inc.; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Vienna; the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York; Alfred A. Knopf; the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress; the Mary S. Sigourney Award Trust, New York; Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth Altshuler; the Charles A. Dana Foundation, New York; the Ministry of Science and Transport, Austria; the American Psychoanalytic Foundation; the Lotte Köhler Foundation; Austrian Airlines; Österreichische Lotterien; Hoffman-La Roche Inc.; O.S. Wyatt Jr., Houston; the Embassy of Austria; the New-Land Foundation, New York; Peter Sobolak, Vienna; and private contributors
