Guest Editorial

In the last century of the second millennium of the common era, Freud's thought and writings transformed the intellectual life of Western culture. His first psychoanalytic book with Josef Breuer, “Studies on Hysteria,” which appeared in 1895, and the writings which followed influenced a small band of colleagues and students, most of whom were in medicine. With the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1900—and despite the fact that it initially only sold 800 copies—Freud had not only stumbled upon free association, the technical mainstay of the psychoanalytic method, but had discovered the essential secrets hidden in the realm of dreams: a way of thinking that differed radically from logical thought, the principles of unconscious motivation and self analysis. His theory of mind was first developed in the unpublished “project,” first appeared in the dream book, and proved surprisingly prescient in many respects despite major revision with the evolution of scientific paradigms and the availability of new research projects in the subsequent 100 years of the twentieth century.

Freud's work has never been without its critics, from those who, as we can see in retrospect, conducted personal and groundless attacks, to those with thoughtful and serious scientific disagreements. Today we still have critics of psychoanalysis who seem to lie in both categories. The landmark Library of Congress exhibit of material from the Freud Archives, complemented by artifacts and scholarship from the Sigmund Freud Museums of London and Vienna opened in October, 1998, after two years of delay. Although the Library cited issues of funding, skeptics remained convinced it was the outcry from Freud detractors that forced the delay. The design of the exhibit when it finally debuted, gave voice to the critics who have spoken throughout the century, and that voice was given more prominence in the volume edited by the exhibit curator, Michael Roth, Freud: Conflict and Culture (1998).

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