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As an aperitif to Freud's historic visit to Clark University in 1909, his American disciple A. A. Brill took him on a whirlwind tour of New York City. Among the sites they visited was Coney Island, which, according to Jones (1955, p. 56), Freud found fascinating. He described it as “a magnified Prater” (referring, of course, to the celebrated amusement park in Vienna).
Little else is known of his reaction to that visit; no reference to it appears in his published writings or in his known letters. But to a small group of Coney Island's mostly Jewish intellectuals that incident was never forgotten. In 1926, led by an artist and designer named Albert Grass, they founded the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Drawing from the archives of the society, which she recently discovered, the artist Zoe Beloff (the editor of this intriguing book) writes that the group met monthly in an office on Surf Avenue, where they held lectures and discussions and, most important, screenings of filmed re-creations of their dreams, guided by their readings from “dog-eared copies of The Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud 1900; Beloff incorrectly gives the date as 1913, apparently using the publication date of Brill's translation). “It