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In 2017, the United States Library of Congress announced that it had completed, with the support of The Polonsky Foundation and with assistance from the Sigmund Freud Archives, the digitization of the Sigmund Freud Papers. The Library houses the most extensive collection of Freud's psychoanalytic and personal papers. Its digital collection includes Freud's handwritten manuscripts, his correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, his notes and memorabilia, related biographical records, and hundreds of interviews and recollections. It is now fully available to scholars and teachers of Freud at the Library's website.
The creation of the digital Freud Papers at the Library of Congress seemed a propitious moment to consider Freud's place in contemporary psychoanalytic scholarship and education. With this event as immediate inspiration and bearing in mind a context of cultural and scholarly ambivalence toward Freud, the Sigmund Freud Archives organized the symposium “Teaching Freud Today” at the American Psychoanalytic Association's National Meeting in January 2017. Two considerations motivated the choice of topic. First, although psychoanalysis began as the creation of a single visionary, Freud's ideas have become so deeply ingrained in our culture and practice that their influence can be overlooked. Second, Freud's place in education—both within our institutes and beyond—has been in dispute for years, perhaps never more so than in the present. The panelists whose contributions are published in this issue of American Imago therefore addressed several timely questions: What elements of Freud's thinking remain vital today, for psychoanalytic clinical training, and for scholarship in other fields of study? How might the clinical application and academic