Case histories - Sigmund Freud, Jewish Museum, New York, NY

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Jillian Saint Jacques

"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.