You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” is an exhibit created by the Library of Congress, scheduled to travel to several cities, and sure to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. It consists of approximately 116 objects—most of them manuscripts and books written by Freud and photographs related to his life—along with written comments, videotapes, and selections from his collection of antiquities.
One time, before reading a story to my son, who was then nine years old, I warned him that it might be frightening. “There's nothing to be scared about, Dad,” he said. “It's only ink on a page.” Before going on I must observe that my son's comment cannot be understood without Freud's concept of defense mechanisms. My son had learned a way of protecting himself against threatening feelings; he practiced a variation of the defense of “isolation of affect,” in which the content (in this case, what happens in the story) remains in the conscious mind while the associated emotion (in this case, fear) is stripped away.
No one can deny that the story was ink on a page. But that is not all it was. The ink was arranged into letters, and the letters were organized into words that told a story. The context of the ink gave it its meaning.
Similarly one can say that the most valuable and attractive of the objects in the Freud exhibit, the manuscripts that he himself wrote, are no more than ink on a page. They derive their meaning from the role they played within the context of Freud's life and work. My goal in this essay is to explain that context, to provide an overview of Freud's experience and the development of his thinking. People who plan to attend, or have attended, the Freud exhibit are my primary