[Image] HE'S UNDER ATTACK IN MANY QUARTERS, BUT NOT IN A LIBRARY OF CONGRESS EXHIBIT. Sigmund Freud Redux BY RICHARD POLLAK What did I think back in 1948 when Laurence Olivier bussed Gertrude full on the lips? I was dimly aware that a man named Freud had decreed that I wanted to kill my father and sleep with my mother, who was sitting next to me in the darkened theater as Hamlet unreeled before us. Did I secretly want to give the Olivier approach a try? Seems unlikely; I suspect I found the whole Sophoclean scenario a bit improbable, if not melodramatic. Besides, at 14 I was doubtless too excited by all the swordplay and attendant gore on the screen to think very hard about incest. Of course, I would soon learn in those heady days of psychoanalysis that such distractions only served to help suppress my unconscious wish. I saw Olivier's kiss again recently on a spool of film clips titled "Oedipus Complex," part of "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," the Library of Congress exhibit now under way in Washington, DC, and due at the Jewish Museum in New York City in April. Olivier's eyes are angry, the kiss a sarcastic smack of death for this just-widowed mother who has so quickly bedded his murderous uncle. The Oedipal interpretation now seems altogether quaint, as does so much of this century's glib Freudian gloss. "I can remember, I can remember, I can remember," says Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), as door after door opens down a long corridor. This from another reel of film clips, under the rubric "Repression." In 1995, a group of independent scholars who feared that the library would embrace such concepts in an uncritical homage to their originator asked in a petition that the exhibit "adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to intellectual history." This modest request spooked much of the psychoanalytic establishment. Harold Blum, executive director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and a member of the exhibit's review panel, cried censorship and called the petition an "assault" on freedom of expression at all libraries and universities. From France came a counterpetition, signed by "180 personalities of the intellectual world," accusing the full-spectrum advocates of staging a violent anti-Freud witch hunt. The American psychoanalyst Sanford Gifford implied they might be allies of "right-wing religious fanatic[s]." "And why do you think you are so upset?" Freud might have asked his angry acolytes. What the library did, partly for lack of funds, is postpone the exhibit, originally scheduled to open in 1996, and regroup. Now, in the introduction to a book of eighteen essays published in conjunction with the exhibit, its curator, Michael Roth, writes that neither the exhibit nor the book seeks to make a case for Freud's influence being positive or negative. This is true of the book, about which more below. The exhibit, however, is for the most part a predictable tribute to the man who, as Auden famously wrote, became less a person than "a whole climate of opinion." Freud constantly drove himself toward the ideal of Leistung, the accomplishment of singular and diverse achievements. "I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work," he wrote in 1910, when he was 53. He had one secret prayer: that he would not waste away but die in harness, as Macbeth urged. Drawn primarily from the library's vast store of Freudiana--some 50,000 items in the manuscript division alone--the exhibit amply documents this remarkable passion for work. The many manuscripts on display seem barely able to contain his gusher of thought--about everything from "Anna O." and the "Rat Man" to "Female Sexuality" and Civilization and Its Discontents. The handwritten lines slope gently upward hard upon one another, a minimal margin on the left, none on the right. One scholar estimates that Freud wrote some 20,000 letters, of which 14,000 survive. An edited collection might fill more than seventy volumes, three times the size of Strachey's Standard Edition of the complete psychological works. Photographs and artifacts augment the manuscripts, illuminating Freud's life from his early days as a neuroscientist through the rise of psychoanalysis to his flight from the Nazis in 1938 and his death at 83 in London the following year. The oblong doorplate from Berggasse 19 reads: "Prof. Dr. Freud," the double honorific very Viennese. A picture postcard of the Schloss Bellevue, on the outskirts of Vienna, announces: "In this house on July 24, 1895, the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud." Neolithic stone axes and prehistoric hand axes attest to his lifelong fascination with ancient objects. There is the death mask of Sergei Pankejeff, the wealthy Russian aristocrat who dreamed of wolves in a tree outside his bedroom window and became famous as Freud's "Wolf Man." An envelope with prescription and wrapper that held cocaine testifies to Freud's short-lived habit. Such displays alternate with several TV screens that offer not only the scenes from Hamlet and The Three Faces of Eve but many other snippets documenting Freud's impact on popular culture: Fred Flintstone hypnotizing Wilma so she'll bark like a big dog; Salvador Dali's dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945); putative examples of transference from The Cobweb (1955) and What About Bob? (1991). Freud may never in fact have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but just in case, we get Candice Bergen dusting off the one-liner as Murphy Brown. More substantial than this flicker of clips is the film and video series that accompanies the exhibit in the evenings. These fifty-two complete works cover a wide range dating back to How Old Is Ann? (1903), a one-minute movie about a man driven mad by a newspaper puzzle. All of Hamlet and Spellbound are on the schedule, as are John Huston's Freud (1962) and his Let There Be Light (1946), a US Army film about World War II veterans recovering from what was then called "shell shock." For the less reverent, there is Oedipus Wrecks (1989), in which a Jewish mother hovers over Woody Allen like the Goodyear blimp, and a 1996 episode of the sitcom Frasier, in which the manic Seattle talk-show psychiatrist grapples with his own recurring dream. The profusion of pop culture serves as a useful reminder of how difficult it gradually became over the course of the twentieth century to think about life outside the Freudian box. Perhaps inevitably, since its primary purpose is to show off what's in the archive, the exhibit as a whole stays inside that box. Little attempt is made to illustrate, much less engage, the serious scholarship that in recent years has challenged many of Freud's theories and the efficacy of psychoanalysis. Criticism is limited to the occasional wall quote high above the display cases: poorly lighted, hard-to-read arched eyebrows such as "Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts" (Vladimir Nabokov) or "Psychoanalysis is the malady which considers itself the remedy" (Karl Kraus). These are amusing zingers but no substitute for thoughtful argument, which the library offers only in the companion book, Freud: Conflict and Culture (Knopf), edited by curator Roth, a historian and author of Psycho-Analysis as History. Most of the essays fall broadly into the "Yes-But" category. Yes, writes Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, from the modern standpoint "Freud is often simply wrong." But he was right that the "examination of the emotional content of memory deserves a place in the medical enterprise and in our daily lives." José Brunner, author of Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, writes that, yes, the Master's patriarchal view of women "hardly needs to be dignified by serious consideration." But much valuable contemporary feminist thinking has grown out of it. Yes, says Hannah Decker, a historian, feminists and literary critics have found in Freud's handling of Dora "an overweening masculine bias, grossly unsympathetic treatment, and significant errors of technique." But even though Freud, by his own admission, failed to help the now famous young "hysteric" who came to him in 1900, the treatment turned out to be of "immense importance" because he discovered the significance of transference. There are strictly yes-men too, chief among them Peter Gay, the historian and Freud biographer. He wants his fellow historians to use psychoanalysis in their research because, like history, it is "an empirical inquiry...wedded to the conscientious search for evidence." He knows most historians don't see it that way, and lists some of the (quite good) arguments they make for not employing psychoanalytic methods: their reductionist way of dealing with scanty evidence, their preoccupation with dreams instead of hard evidence, their basis in a highly selective, unrepresentative sample of humanity, "late nineteenth-century upper-class Viennese Jewish women." Still, Gay writes, historians should embrace psychoanalysis as a style of thinking: If they discover a diary, for example, Freud's techniques would allow them to draw "plausible inferences." Frank Cioffi and Adolf Grünbaum, the two certified anti-Freudians in the collection, would likely find Gay's recommendations dubious, to put it politely. Both regard psychoanalysis as pseudoscientific and the efforts to make an empirical case for it doomed. Grünbaum, a philosopher of science and author of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, argues that Freud failed ever to demonstrate that his much-celebrated therapeutic tool, free association, actually unearthed repression and ameliorated psychopathology. And he thinks Freud's argument for wish-driven dreaming was stillborn because "his interpretations were constrained to reconcile wish-contravening dreams with the decreed universality of wish-fulfillment." These and other weaknesses in Freud's methodology have been there to see throughout the century, writes Cioffi, author of Freud and the Question of Pseudo-science. They have been ignored for so long by so many, he maintains, because of the docility of analysands and the tendentiousness of the psychoanalytic establishment. The psychiatrist Robert Coles, though by no means an anti-Freudian, attacks that tendentiousness in another of the book's essays. He quotes Erik Erikson, whose biography he wrote, as worrying that many of his contemporaries concentrated less on pursuing therapeutic enlightenment than "on messianic zeal, on punitive orthodoxy, on faddist sensationalism, on professional and social ambition." What Erikson was really talking about, Coles writes, was "a modern instance of idolatry--the passion for creedal submission that bears down upon even members of the agnostic intelligentsia." Coles also argues that we have not sufficiently examined the social and political consequences of a clinical experience reserved chiefly for the well-to-do, have not explored "the way doctors who see only one kind of patient, from one kind of social and economic and cultural (maybe even racial) background, gradually get drawn into the assumptions and preoccupations (if not convictions) of their patients." Nor have we looked hard at the damage psychoanalysis has done in some quarters, a subject treated neither in the book nor the exhibit. The trafficking in blame is one of Freud's most pernicious legacies, especially in the United States. During the forties, fifties and well into the sixties, hundreds of his disciples confidently pointed their fingers at parents. Mothers especially either smothered and spoiled their children or cruelly rejected them, causing everything from stuttering and psychologically scarring "incorrect" toilet training to autism and schizophrenia. (For a careful and devastating indictment of "therapeutic" practice in these last two areas, see Edward Dolnick's recently published Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis.) Freud and his followers are also partly responsible for the terrible pain caused by the "recovered memory" movement. Though at last largely discredited, in the eighties and early nineties it created emotional havoc for those whose memories of "repressed" childhood sexual abuse many therapists avidly conjured up and for those accused of the abuse, most of whom are permanently branded as perverts and several of whom languish in prison on the flimsiest hearsay evidence. Like so many other key Freudian theories, repression is an unproven concept; yet it is the bottomless well to which the recovered-memory therapists went again and again, manipulating their grown patients into eye-popping recollections that they had been raped in the crib by Dad or seduced by Satan into ritual murder. Freud and his "cause" are in retreat, the exhibit notwithstanding. Dozens of less expensive therapies that don't require months if not years on a couch have proliferated, and psychotropic drugs have proved increasingly effective in treating depression and other serious mental disorders, a development eagerly promoted by the pharmaceutical-medical-insurance complex in pursuit of fat profits. But Freud is in eclipse primarily because many of his claims for psychoanalysis no longer withstand scrutiny and those in the club who continue to insist they do sound more and more like flat-earthers. Still, the late Alfred Kazin was right when he observed that, for many, Freud replaced the Bible as a source of counsel and comfort. The fight over his soul and legacy is unlikely to end anytime soon. Richard Pollak (dpollak@internetmci.com), a Nation contributing editor, is the author of The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (Touchstone). Copyright (c) 1998, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. 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