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The Freud Exhibition organized by the Library of Congress marks the centenary of the birth of psychoanalysis. Its sole parent, Sigmund Freud, has been dead for over sixty years—indeed, he was born before the American Civil War, relatively early in the reign of Queen Victoria—yet his contribution to modern civilization has been so profound that his work has stayed in the center of attention (whether to be praised or denigrated) throughout the twentieth century. The current exhibition therefore provides a suitable opportunity to reappraise Freud's achievements in all their multiplicity.
One way to summarize his life's work is simply to state that he invented a new scientific discipline that has steadily grown for over a hundred years and in every part of the developed world—an intellectual and organizational feat of some magnitude. His scientific writings (in English translation) comprise 24 volumes and continue to be read, not only by professional psychoanalysts. In fact, so great has Freud's prestige been in educated circles that, even today, two to four generations after its original publication, his oeuvre is commonly equated with the conceptual world of psychoanalysis.
In recent years discussions of Freud's work aimed at the general public have tended to focus on those of his hypotheses that have been invalidated by a variety of scientific advances. Because Freud unequivocally adhered to the conception of psychoanalysis as a branch of biological science, he attempted to correlate his observational data with the biology of his own time—specifically with the prevalent theories of contemporary neurophysiology. Brain science was in its infancy a hundred years ago, and the concepts Freud (1895) borrowed from his neurological and physiological mentors—Wilhelm Brücke, Theodor Meynert, Josef Breuer—have not stood the test of time. In the most general sense, the