Freud: Conflict and Culture - Essays on His Life, Work, and Legacy.

edited by Michael S. Roth New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998 274 pp./$26.00 (hb)

"Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" is a comfortable visual experience. Its curatorial strategy and layout are straightforward and follow a linear chronology. Yet the questions the exhibition raises about how we now view Freudian psychoanalysis are far from simple. On its surface, "Conflict and Culture" showcases an overwhelming compendium of artifacts, predominantly gleaned from the Library of Congress. There are more than 170 vintage photographs, daguerreotypes, prints, films, manuscripts and notes scrawled in Freud's manic German.(1) Section one, "Formative Years," is familiar material. A youthful Freud poses stoically with his fiancee Martha Bernays in a photograph from her engagement album The Freud family Bible reveals a Hebrew inscription written to Freud from his father Jacob. A 1936 etching on foiled paper depicts Freud's birthplace in Freiburg.

Section two, "The Individual: Therapy and Theory," introduces viewers to Freud's earliest research: treatises on the medical efficacy of cocaine, his initial fascination with hypnosis and neurology and his time spent in Paris under the tutelage of Jean-Martin Charcot.(2) It is also in "The Individual: Therapy and Theory" that viewers first encounter the extensive holographic documentation of Freud's case studies, embellished with appropriate relics. The actual death mask of The Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) evokes a poignant awareness of mortality when contrasted with a stiff photograph of Pankejeff at a dinner table, resplendent in white coat, aloof and lupine. Freud's innumerable notes on The Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) point out his obsession with research, observation and evidence. As we see Freud's passion for his psychoanalytic methodology intensify, we also find it tempered by the painful lessons about transference that Freud discovered during the famous botched case of Dora (Ida Bauer).

As the exhibit continues, it urges viewers to align themselves with one of Freud's most controversial conclusions: that culture is itself a locus of repressed desires and conflicts. Cultural repression must, therefore, release itself, and it often does so through acts of mass sexual aggression such as war. As if to underscore Freud's hypothesis, the tangle of viewers elbowing into the cramped "Sexuality and Aggression" compartment provides the physical evidence of Freud's theory. Our fellow viewers become our fellow neurotics, as we take shape as "the primal horde." The uneasiness of being stuffed into the "Sexuality and Aggression" compartment is further emphasized by the younger viewers huddled around a video display of Freud-influenced excerpts from television shows and films such as Marnie (1964, by Alfred Hitchcock), Bewitched and The Flintstones. On the day I saw "Conflict and Culture" at the Library of Congress it took courage to muscle into the ring of video viewers and elderly and physically challenged museum patrons were left on the outer edges to wonder what all the chuckling was about. The cheeky presentation of Freudian witticisms and psychoanalytic stereotypes only serves to heighten the contrast of the weighty presence of Freud's writings, which are everywhere.

As section two draws to a close, we witness Freud sharpening his focus on the aggressive tendencies of sexually repressed cultures. He begins to formulate the incendiary possibilities of Oedipus, placing great emphasis on the psychosexual relationship of an infant to its father and mother. "The beginning of religion, morals, society and art all converge in the Oedipus complex," Freud muses in one of the overhead notes much to the chagrin of many feminists, whose comments are juxtaposed with them. "Freud never showed much concern with the destiny of woman," reads a quotation by Simone de Beauvoir. "It is clear that he simply adapted his account from the destiny of man, with slight modifications." Germaine Greet follows: "Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother."

The next section of "Conflict and Culture" is a glassed-in recreation of Freud's office at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. We recognize Freud's study as a rhizome of activity where he struggled to organize his theories into real practice. Freud's collection of non-western ceremonial objects, popular among Viennese intellectuals of the time, is on display. Nearby is a recreation of Freud's couch with the actual Persian carpet on which Freud's patients reclined, joining Freud in a quest for the ethereal meaning of symptoms, signs and dreams. On an adjacent wall flickers a selection of home movies featuring Freud and his family. For many of us, this is the first time we perceive Freud as a husband and a father - the Freud who slept with Martha every night, fed his dogs, kissed his daughter, looked up into the camera as if to say: "Come on, get that thing out of my face, won't you?"

As we become comfortable with the museological framing of Freud and his work, our sensibilities are piqued by section three, entitled "From the Individual to Society." Following the impact and implications of Freud's theories regarding human sexuality and aggression as well as his penchant for institutional control, Freud was attacked on many fronts. Colleagues within "The Committee," Freud's praetorian guard of up-and-coming young psychoanalysts, were eager to wrest power and notoriety from their patriarch. This led to in-fighting that resulted in Freud's termination of his professional relationship with Carl Jung. Other adversaries of Freud included organized religion, the institution of traditional medicine and numerous scientific societiesu Nonetheless, as Freud and his work gained credibility his circle of influence broadened, and in 1909 he traveled to the United States with a group of colleagues to discuss new methods of treating mental illness.

Painstakingly, Freud formed an institutional framework in which to shelter psychoanalysis and one that influenced the founding of The International Psychoanalytic Association at the turn of the century. Yet, the obstacles Freud faced were not merely the reactions to his work, but the interpretations of it - or as Jean LaPlanche and J. B. Pontalis have pointed out in The Language of Psycho-Analysis:

It is now almost three-quarters of a century since psycho-analysis came into being. The psycho-analytical "movement" has had a long and stormy history. Groups of analysts have been formed in many countries where the specificity of cultural factors could hardly have failed to exert an influence upon the actual concepts of the science.(3)

Despite the ongoing cultural meconnaissance concerning the import of Freud's research, his insights of what he saw as mounting psychosexual aggression in the world around him deepened. In 1915 Freud wrote: "... primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable." Freud's response to World War I had been fairly patriotic - two of Freud's sons volunteered for duty in the Austrian army - but as antiSemitism began to surface in the advent of World War II, Freud's theoretical tone darkened. Of Civilization and Its Discontents a 1930 New York times reporter said, "It is not a book for persons with weak hearts, weak minds or an unshaken belief in Santa Claus. None of Dr. Freud's books are. But a sense of humor, which Dr. Freud appears to lack, may save otherwise impressionable readers from jumping into the river immediately after finishing the final chapter." As a premiere psychologist, and most of all as a Jew, Freud was labeled an enemy of Nazi Germany and forced to evacuate his beloved Berggasse 19 in 1938 for his own safety. With the assistance of influential friends, he took up residence in London. The intensity of antiSemitic hatred in 1930s Austria is revealed in Joseph Schorer's photographs of a book-burning in Berlin's Opernplatz as well as a small photograph of Freud's four sisters, Dolfi, Mitzi, Rosa and Pauli, who remained in Vienna after Freud was taken out of danger. Dolfi died of starvation in Thieresienstadt, while Mitzi, Rosa and Pauli were murdered in other Nazi death camps.

As "Conflict and Culture" draws to a close, we can see that Freud's darkest hours came during his final years. Torn between his identity as a Viennese intellectual and his persecution as a Jew, Freud never recovered from the disruption of the war. or from having had to flee his beloved Berggasse 19. However, Freud never succumbed to despair. In a 1938 BBC radio interview Freud, elderly and ailing from cancer of the jaw, looks to the future of psychoanalytic research and says: "the struggle is not yet over."

Neither is "Conflict and Culture." As the exhibition moves from venue to venue, shifting its site-specific possibilities and implications, it will impel refreshed viewer-identification and address. Each change of venue will almost certainly give rise to new questions and issues concerning the curatorial approach of "Conflict and Culture" as well as its exclusion of groups such as feminists, Freudian theorists from third world countries and the American psychoanalytic/medical community at large. Having already reaped its share of controversial press, the fate of "Conflict and Culture" points to escalating polemics among critics and scholars who have a stake in defining Freud. According to the curatorial staff, they have tried to address the questions in context as much as possible, but the advent of unpredictable interpretations of a traveling show like "Conflict and Culture" poses one of the exhibition's largest challenges. "Curatorial control diminishes as you move away from the institution that hired you. . . . [T]he curator is not the owner, "observed Michael Roth, the lead curator of "Conflict and Culture."(4)

Roth is also editor of the exhibition's excellent companion volume Freud: Conflict and Culture - Essays on his life, work, and legacy. According to Roth, the work of conceptual artists and their use of archival material informed many of his curatorial decisions. This modus operandi based on the transtextuality of conceptual art seems to work to the advantage of "Conflict and Culture." When the exhibition appeared at the Library of Congress, for example, Roth relied heavily on juxtaposing the open-ended praxis of archaeology with the obsessive archival quality of psychoanalytic research. By using an archaeological methodology to expose the many strata of psychoanalytic theory and its interpretation, "Conflict and Culture" conveys messages mere biographies and records cannot. Roth compared these curatorial motives to those of the psychoanalyst (with the viewer as a patient). "Psychoanalysis doesn't have a message with a definite content," Roth said. "It requests you to find your own take on how you've become who you are."

Like the Library of Congress, Freud was a compulsive archivist and collector. In fact he epitomized Victorian science by cataloging exotic rarities, discovering exemplary specimens and defining social/neurological characteristics. When Freud went so far as to admit that his collection of case histories "read like short stories," he neglected to mention the similarities of his case histories (and their methodologies) to Darwinist processes of collection and categorization. As patriarchs of the Victorian fantasy of a scientific, rationalist culture, Darwin defined The Origin of the Species and Freud defined The Origin of The Unconscious.(5)

Yet who is now defining Freud? As the lead venue, the Library of Congress holds an important position as it frequently boasts ownership of more Freudian documents than any other institution. What we are witnessing is a type of material ownership of Freud, an ownership that repositions the heredity of Freudian psychoanalysis. Perhaps it was an appropriate choice, then, for curators of "Conflict and Culture" to present positive and negative quotations concerning Freud on overhead panels above each section (taking on the position of the superego). Yet one wonders why there is nothing underfoot - unless it was the curatorial intent to implicate the Library of Congress as the id, the collective unconscious of centuries of American bibliophiles (or politicians who hold the keys to governmental storehouses of information) who regulate its dispersal to the public.

It may be too soon to tell, but the recent relocation of "Conflict and Culture" to The Jewish Museum may cast a different light on Freud's relationship to Judaism. Certainly the logistics of the exhibition have changed. Because The Jewish Museum is smaller, the sections have been broken to fit more modest accommodations. In addition, the numerous overhead quotations that once illustrated cultural and theoretical conflicts regarding Freud's concepts have been reduced to one or two quotations per compartment. The effect of this curatorial editing is striking and does not serve in the best interests of "Conflict and Culture." The effect of having one emblematic quotation over each compartment solidifies a dogmatic historicization of Freudian theory that narrows the latitude for association and questioning. Susan Chevlowe, associate curator at The Jewish Museum, said "Conflict and Culture" could call upon Jews to reevaluate their relationship to Freud.(6) Although Chevlowe agreed that Freud's identification with Judaism heightened as he perceived the forces of fascism rising against him, she referred to recent discourse that suggests that Freudian psychoanalysis shares more affinities with Judaism than we think. "Freud's own oedipal conflict was with his religion," said Chevlowe, referring to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose 1991 book Freud's Moses has much to say concerning German myopia regarding Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis:

. . . while Freud found it personally congenial to be among Jews, he also became increasingly convinced of the peril for the budding psychoanalytic movement if it continued to be regarded as composed exclusively of Jews and thus stigmatized as both Jewish and parochial. In order to be accepted as a science, psychoanalysis must not only be universal; it must be perceived as such. To put it very crudely, Freud needed a goy, and not just any goy but one of genuine stature and influence. Miraculously, as it were, the apparently ideal goy did not have to be sought. It was Carl Jung who, in 1906, sought out Freud.(7)

In Freud's Moses Yerushalmi speculates at length about the Jewish significance of Freud's final work, "Moses and Monotheism." In particular, Yerushalmi suggests that the impact of Nazism impelled Freud's reexamination of his Jewish roots. "Under the impact of the triumph of Nazism . . . Freud decides the time has come to write his first and only Jewish book," writes Yerushalmi, "to attempt to answer the hitherto unanswerable question of what makes him a Jew. In order to do so, at the age of seventy-eight he does what his father mandated him to do when he was thirty-five - he returns to the Bible. The point is a major one."(8)

That Freud took up the archetype of Moses as both lawmaker and law-giver is another major point that is not lost on Yerushalmi. Likewise, through the context of "Conflict and Culture" at The Jewish Museum, viewers may gain a redefined insight into several Mosaic Freuds: the Moses/Freud who was constantly doubted by his closest followers; the Moses/Freud who came down the mountain with the tablets of Law in his hands (but who was rejected by the people destined to become its adherents); and the Moses/Freud who never got into the promised land himself, but died within eyesight of it.

Recontextualizing "Conflict and Culture" at The Jewish Museum is important for Jewish feminists and scholars who realize the significance of another group of Jews crucial to Freud's life (and livelihood): his female patients. Anti-Semitism was not the only crime against humanity in the Vienna of the early 1900s, there was also widespread cultural misogyny, which may have driven many women to seek psychoanalysis, which was regarded as quackery by most medical authorities. As Hannah S. Decker observes in "Freud's 'Dora' Case,"

Looming over everything, affecting . . . [Dora's] . . . consciousness and self-worth, was the fact that she was a Jew and a woman living in a society both antiSemitic and misogynist. Since she had been born, she and her family had experienced increasing anti-Jewish sentiment, and in spite of the beginning of calls for female equality in Austria, still stronger voices preached women's inherent inadequacy.(9)

As Roth conceded in our interview, "Conflict and Culture" could have perhaps dealt with feminism's response to Freud more thoroughly, but neither Roth nor the curatorial board wanted to swing the pendulum of cultural response to Freud in favor of any one interest group. This was certainly a legitimate peril, in light of the players with heavy stakes in the definition of Freud.

Such stakes will rise even higher when "Conflict and Culture" arrives in Vienna and its context changes again. Although such hypothesis is speculative, Roth noted that the way Europeans (particularly the Viennese) view the archiving of Freud - and Freud's relationship to Germanic culture - differs greatly from in the U.S. As the locus of repression surrounding a controversial exhibition migrates, so migrates the intensity of transference and counter-transference in relationship to it. The changing contexts of "Conflict and Culture" will be a gauge for a host country's relationship to the exhibition's museological imaging of Freudian psychoanalysis. "Every country has its own Freud," Roth noted.

According to him, Vienna has been engaged in reclaiming Freud for several decades, stemming in part from an effort to mollify the stigma of anti-Semitism that sullied Vienna's reputation following the Austrian alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II. An equal measure is a peace offering for the fact that Vienna formally disowned Freudian psychoanalysis until the founding of The Freud Society in the late 1960s. Legend has it that in the 1950s when travelers would show up at Berggasse 19 requesting a glimpse of Freud's old offices, residents would say: "We've never heard of Dr. Freud . . . but if you are feeling sick, there's a general practitioner who lives down the lane."

As presented at the Library of Congress, "Conflict and Culture" was an exhibition of signs, signals and markers, of questions and relationships. As presented at The Jewish Museum, however, the open-ended associations are somewhat mitigated by the elimination of the overhead quotations. Yet at the same time there is a reorientation in terms of historicization and personal transference - in particular regarding the relationship of viewers to Jewish history. In both cases, this sense of incompletion hinges on a combination of three dynamics: the fact that much of Freud's work remained unfinished at the time of his death, the fact that this particular curation of Freud's work emphasizes the conflicted cultural responses to psychoanalysis and the singular logistics of each institution in which "Conflict and Culture" will appear. Even Roth feels that there are pieces missing: Freud's impact on the arts in general, the relationship of Freudian psychology to feminist theory and the way Freud is regarded by the institution of clinical psychiatry at large. Non-western responses to Freudian theory as well as Freud's interest in non-western fertility rituals and sexual iconography are also unaddressed. Nonetheless, the loose ends and unsolved mysteries within "Conflict and Culture" do not prove to be its downfall - they are precisely what ensures its archaeological sense of depth. In particular the overhead quotations become activated forums within which viewers can engage their own personal politics.

All too often biographical exhibitions such as these end up as either the hagiography of a large persona, a testimony to the conflict surrounding their work or a critique of patriarchal power. As it appeared at the Library of Congress and The Jewish Museum, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" goes beyond all these curatorial tropes, invoking viewers to step back and reassess their case histories - not only on Freud, his work and themselves, but on an interminable culture that provides both shelter and conflict.

An on-line tour of "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" can be seen at: www.loc.gov.

NOTES

1. The bulk of "Conflict and Culture" was extruded from more than 80,000 Freud-related documents in the possession of the Library of Congress, as well as the Freud Museum in London, The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and other collections, both private and public. It is thought that Freud produced close to 50,000 pages of material, including notes and drafts for books, notes about what happened during sessions and correspondence to fellow researchers and friends. Although I overheard several audience members argue that there could have been more English translation of Freud's voluminous notes, the fact that Freud wrote so prodigiously - and the fact that much of Freud's life was so quintessentially fin de siecle Vienna - emphasized the intense Germanness of the Freudian experience - while simultaneously evoking an anxiety concerning the conflict between Germany and Judaism which was to come.

2. It is here that we see Freud begin to separate himself from the laboratory experiment and shift increasingly into the realm of theory, ignoring Charcot's caution: "Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing."

3. Jean LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Donald Nicholson Smith (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), p. xi.

4. All references to Michael S. Roth are taken from an interview with the author, February 24, 1999. Roth is also the Associate Director for The Getty Research Institute of Art and the Humanities, in Los Angeles. He also edited the book Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997).

5. Oliver Sacks, "The Other Road," in Freud: Conflict and Culture, pp. 221-34. Sacks suggests that Freud's approach to categorizing neurological ailments has similarities to Charles Darwin's categorization of species. Hence, it is also possible that a Darwinist approach influenced Freud's understanding of psychology.

6. All references to Susan Chevlowe are taken from an interview with the author, February 26, 1999.

7. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 41.

8. Ibid., p. 77.

9. Hannah S. Decker, "Freud's 'Dora' Case," in Freud: Conflict and Culture, p. 113.

JILLIAN SAINT JACQUES is an artist and freelance writer living in Rochester, NY.