SEX SELLS SIGMUND FREUD ANALYZED IN REVEALING EXHIBITION.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

To his admirers, Sigmund Freud looms as a kind of latter-day Moses, leading humanity out of the repressive Victorian past into a promised land full of liberating ``thou shalts.''

To his equally passionate detractors, the founding father of psychoanalysis casts a charlatan's shadow over modern love and relationships.

They see him, at best, as a sphinx without a riddle, a fuddy-duddy Viennese biologist dispensing mental-health placebos to middle-class neurotics. At worst, he's considered a sexist pig who built a pseudo- science out of his willful misreadings of his patients' symptoms - particularly the female ones.

So when Michael S. Roth set about organizing ``Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,'' the large exhibition of all things Oedipally fixated that opened two years ago at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and transferred last week to the Skirball Cultural Center, he knew the long knives would be coming out to carve up Freud's controversial legacy.

``I anticipated that not everybody would love it (the exhibition),'' says Roth, associate director of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, just down the 405 freeway from the Skirball. ``The big surprise to me was that the heat started before the show was really much developed.''

The sequence of events that prefigured the exhibition's Washington debut - petitions, academic mud-slinging, political intrigue and, finally, face-saving compromise - so far has been absent from the show's L.A. engagement, which runs through July 25.

But the depth of feeling that Freud still arouses, 61 years after his death from incurable jaw cancer while in London, exiled from his Nazi-fied homeland, tells a lot about his enduring cultural impact.

To paraphrase what Freud supposedly said (but never actually did) about cigars, sometimes an exhibition is not just an exhibition. When you're analyzing a figure as complicated, maddening, prolific, bullying and brilliant as Freud, egos tend to get bruised and reasonable people (as well as unreasonable ones) are bound to disagree.

And that, says the Ivy League-trained Roth, is precisely the exhibition's point: Not to take a pro or con position on Freud, but to lay out his major ideas - the Oedipus complex, the seduction theory, his notions of memory, childhood, identity, repression and the self - then let viewers form their own judgments.

What you can't do with Freud, Roth insists, is to deny his influence, which is so pervasive that we hardly notice it anymore. Though the drug- based therapies favored by HMOs are rapidly replacing the ``talking cure'' of psychoanalysis, Freud's ideas persist in the jokes we tell, the movies and TV shows we watch, the everyday terms we use (``Freudian slip,'' ``anal-retentive''), and in the assumptions we make about why human beings do the crazy things they do, Roth says.

In taking stock of Freud's cultural contributions, the main exhibition of manuscripts, letters, documents, vintage photographs and prints is being augmented with lectures about Freud's theories on art, religion and culture, plus movie and TV screenings, live performances of music from Freud's Vienna and two comedy programs (see related story).

``This is the most ambitious thing we've ever done here programatically,'' says Robert Kirschner, program director at the Skirball, which leapt at the chance to host the exhibition when the J. Paul Getty Trust offered to fund it as a cooperative venture. ``We're trying to make it accessible and various in terms of its appeal.''

Roth, 42, who'll be leaving the Getty this summer to become president of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, says his intent with the show was to introduce people to what they already knew about Freud.

``All the exhibit wants you to do is pay attention to the voices that are in the air, pay attention to the pictures that are in our world, pay attention to the concepts that you are using, or that are using you,'' Roth says.

``You may want to then say (of Freud's ideas), 'They're bogus, they're wrong, they're pernicious, they're wonderful, they're insightful,' whatever. If we're going to make sense of our own past, we have to figure out what to do with Freud. We may want to reject him, we may want to criticize him, we may want to read him. But we just can't ignore him.''

Structurally, the exhibition is divided into three parts. The first, ``Formative Years,'' explores Freud's family and professional background and his early work in neurology as a young medical doctor.

Among the artifacts included here are the Freud family Bible, with an inscription in Hebrew from Freud's father to his son (who in later life referred to himself as a ``godless Jew'').

Uri D. Herscher, the Skirball's president and CEO, says that Freud threw down a gauntlet to Jewish orthodoxy.

``He rebelled against the legalistic system of Jewish life,'' Herscher says. ``Because Jewish life is a box. There are only two columns, the right and the wrong, and Freud said that gray area between your ears, you've really got to pay attention to it.''

The exhibition's second section, ``The Individual: Theory & Therapy,'' takes a dispassionate look at the key concepts that informed Freudian psychoanalytic theory, including the interpretation of dreams, repression and transference. Drawing heavily on Freud's own hand-written manuscripts, displayed under glass, this section encapsulates what D.M. Thomas, in his Freud-inspired novel ``The White Hotel'' (1981), referred to as ``the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis.''

On display are some of the primitive statues and artifacts Freud kept in his office at 19 Berggasse in Vienna; the famous analysand's couch; and the death mask of one of Freud's most notable patients, the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man because of a childhood dream he had of six silent wolves perched in a tree. (Freud, being Freud, concluded that the dream represented his patient's subconscious memory of seeing his parents having sex.)

Indirectly, it was this second section that threatened to shut down ``Conflict and Culture'' even before it opened.

Around 1993, shortly after Harold Blum, director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York, proposed the idea of a Freud retrospective, a formidable anti-Freudian lobby arose. Its members were concerned that the show would be nothing more than a bland homage to a fin-du-siecle thinker whose ideas have been roundly criticized and, some claim, largely discredited.

Leading the attack was Peter Swayles, a former promoter for the Rolling Stones turned independent scholar, known for his disturbingly persuasive research indicating that Freud conducted an affair with his sister-in-law.

Swayles circulated a petition, which was signed by more than 50 people including Gloria Steinem and neurologist-author Oliver Sacks. Another prominent critic was Frederick Crews, an English professor who has compared psychoanalysis to ``a business that's heading into Chapter 11.''

Roth, a low-profile cultural historian at Claremont Graduate School prior to joining the Getty in 1996, quickly found himself in the middle of a family feud. He'd been a surprise choice to curate the exhibition in the first place, having published only one book on Freud and having never put together an exhibition before. His scholarly impartiality had impressed the Library of Congress but seemed to arouse suspicion within both the Freudian and anti-Freudian camps.

Tensions were further heightened by the polarized political climate in Washington. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were locked in a budget battle. Federal arts funding was under siege. The ``Enola Gay'' exhibition at the Smithsonian had provoked outrage from veterans groups.

When the Library decided to postpone the Freud show indefinitely and the Washington Post ran a front-page story about it, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, an obscure academic enterprise was a pop phenomenon. Journalists swarmed Roth's suburban home.

``It was a big hoopla, and I was totally unprepared,'' Roth says. ``Friends were calling from Europe saying, 'Are you OK? We hear you're being attacked.' It was crazy.''

Eventually, it was agreed that the exhibition would include wall-mounted text panels expressing critical responses to Freud, floating around the display cases like speech balloons. The exhibition opened in Washington in October 1998 to mostly positive reviews, then moved to the Jewish Museum in New York City.

``All publicity is good,'' Roth reflects. ``I don't think half a million people would've seen the show if it wasn't for that. I mean, it was almost as if we'd engineered it.''

For some viewers, the exhibition's highlight is sure to be its third section, ``From the Individual to Society,'' which looks at how Freud expanded his ideas about personal behavior and applied them to issues of morality and public life.

Following the mass slaughter of World War I, Freud delved deeper into the conflict's seemingly irrational motivations. He speculated that the same aggressive and neurotic forces that unhinged individuals could derail entire societies.

This section also examines how various Freudian disciples and critics spun off from psychoanalysis, and how artists, especially the Surrealists, adopted Freud as an intellectual mascot in tapping the creative mind.

American popular culture's embrace of Freud is reflected in TV and film clips shown on monitors installed throughout the exhibition. We see Fred Flintstone hypnotizing Wilma, Bob Newhart fending off a female patient's displaced affections, and, of course, Lucy Van Pelt hanging out on her psychiatrist's shingle for Charlie Brown. Peanuts envy, anyone?

The clips, along with home movies showing Freud playing with his dogs and his grandchildren, bring a humanizing touch to an exhibition that ends on a grim note.

As Freud passed his final days in England, ravaged by cancer, Europe hovered on the edge of another catastrophic war. One of the last objects toward the exhibition's end is a small photo depicting Freud's five sisters, four of whom died in concentration camps.

The image seems to confirm Freud's worst fears that the human instinct to make war, not love, might win out in the end. Or, to use his terms, ``thanatos'' would trump ``eros.''

Yet as Roth points out, Freud never promised that psychoanalysis would bring happiness or ``closure'' to his patients - let alone fulfill their every desire - only that it might end what he termed their ``hysterical misery.''

While today his pop-psychology descendants dash off quick prescriptions for spiritual clarity or great sex, Freud argued that frustration and struggle were simply necessary parts of being alive.

``That's why Freud is so stoical and maybe even a tragic thinker,'' Roth says. ``And that's surely why we call this 'Conflict and Culture.' Because there is no end of terms of conflict in Freud. Conflict is just a part of the way the world works.''

SHRINK YOUR HEAD OR EXPAND YOUR MIND

Whether you want to shrink your head or just open up your mind, here are highlights of exhibition-related Freudian activities. All events at the Skirball Cultural Center unless otherwise noted.

LectureS

Unless noted, tickets to each individual lecture are $8 (general), $6 (Skirball members), $4 (students). For tickets, call [phone].

April 18, 4 p.m. _ ``Death Drive: Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty,' '' Margaret Iversen, professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex, England. Getty Center Research Institute Lecture Hall. Admission free, reservations required; $5 parking. Call [phone].

April 22, 2 p.m. _ ``Freud and Moses: The Psychological Power of Religious Tradition,'' Richard Bernstein, chairman of the department of philosophy of the New School of Social Research.

May 17, 7:30 p.m. _ ``Freud and His Legacy: Retrospect and Prospect,'' Jonathan Lear, professor of the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.

June 1, 2 p.m. _ ``Mahler and the Crisis of Jewish Identity,'' Raymond Knapp, professor of Musicology at UCLA.

June 6, 7:30 p.m. _ ``Freud and the Idea of the Jew: Theories of Jewish Difference,'' Sander L. Gilman, professor in Human Biology and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.

June 19, 7:30 p.m. _ ``Neurology and the Soul,'' Oliver Sacks.

Movies

All screenings will be followed by a moderated discussion. Tickets to each individual film are $6 (general), $5 (Skirball members), $4 (students). For tickets, call [phone].

April 25, 7:30 p.m. _ ``The Florentine Dagger'' (1935) and ``Deluxe Annie'' (1918).

May 9, 7:30 p.m. _ ``The Case of Becky'' (1915), ``The Dark Mirror'' (1946).

May 25, 7:30 p.m. _ ``Lilith'' (1964), with Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg.

June 13, 7:30 p.m. _ ``The President's Analyst'' (1967), with James Coburn and Godfrey Cambridge.

Television

All screenings at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Free with Skirball or MT&R admission. [phone].

June 1, 7 p.m. _ Interpreting Dreams: The ``Isabella'' episode of ``The Sopranos'' and ``Perchance to Dream'' from ``The Twilight Zone.''

July 6, 7 p.m. _ Biblical themes, Freudian interpretations: ``Revenge'' from ``Alfred Hitchcock Presents,'' Krzysztof Kieslowski's ``Decalogue (IV): 'Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.''

Comedy

Tickets to individual programs are $12 (general), $10 (Skirball members), $6 (students). Call [phone].

May 4, 8 p.m. _ ``Mommy Dearest,'' Julia Sweeney, Ellen Cleghorne, Merrill Makoe and Beth Lapides.

June 25, 1 p.m. _ ``Freud, Groucho and Me,'' with David Steinberg.

- Reed Johnson

THE FACTS

--What: ``Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture.''

--Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.

--When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays. Through July 25.

--Admission: $8 (general); $6 (seniors and students); free to children under 12 and Skirball members. Call [phone] or visit www.skirball.org.

CAPTION(S):

5 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- 2) Sigmund Freud, left, in a 1921 portrait, founded psychoanalysis. He laid out his theories in works such as 1923's ``The Ego and the Id,'' right.

(3 -- 4) At left, Freud with fiancee Martha in 1886. Above, a handwritten letter from 1938 on personal stationery.

(5) Freud sits beside his analytic couch in an unidentified summer residence in 1932. He treated his patients with the cathartic method of talking.

Box:

(1) SHRINK YOUR HEAD OR EXPAND YOUR MIND (see text)

(2) THE FACTS (see text)