The Historic Expedition to America (1909): Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker. Saul Rosenzweig. St. Louis:  Rana House, 1994.  xii + 477 pp. $14.95 (pb). Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. George Prochnik. New York:  Other Press, 2006.  viii + 455 pp. $29.95 (pb). The Interpretation of Murder: A Novel. Jed Rubenfeld. New York:  Henry Holt and Company, 2006.  464 pp. $26.00 (hb).

Did you know that Freud was once in America, actually here? It really did happen, thanks to G. Stanley Hall, pioneering American psychologist and first president of Clark University, who invited both Freud and Jung to an all-star conference to celebrate the school's twentieth anniversary. But how to process this information … ah, that's something else. Freud doesn't really belong in America, not in Worcester, Massachusetts for the conference, not in New York City beforehand, not in James Jackson Putnam's Adirondack summer camp afterward. No, he belongs in Vienna, with cigar-smoke in the air, antiquities on the desk, an oriental covering thrown over the couch, an elaborate interpretation on his mind—and books, books, books on the shelves. How does one imagine him anywhere else? More to the point, how does one place him, say, in Coney Island, with a hotdog in his hand, yellow mustard on his beard? (He did make it to Coney Island, but history is silent on the hot dog, and as for the mustard, I made that up.) Freud just doesn't belong in America. It doesn't fit. Not unless we imagine teen-aged girls at the backstage door, gasping for a glimpse and squealing when they get it: “It's him, it's him, it's really Freud! And he has a cigar! Oh my God, he has a cigar!”

The fact that Freud really was here, from August 29 to September 22, 1909, is either absurd or important, or quite