By now everyone in the circle of analysts and historians concerned with the history of psychoanalysis knows the Library of Congress has postponed its Sigmund Freud exhibit. This step was taken in consequence of malicious behind-the-scenes attacks by a group of anti-Freudians, led apparently by Frederick Crews and Peter Swales. Most people have forgotten this episode, never noticed it, or failed to understand the serious implications it carries regarding the freedom of libraries and museums to exhibit what they choose. The events are still worth reviewing, if only to remind ourselves how even a great institution can be intimidated by “a mouse that roars.”
Preparations for the exhibit, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” had been under way for over a year. Financial support was forthcoming from private donors, foundations, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Austrian government, and the library planned to publish a catalogue documenting its extensive holdings and providing research scholars a long-awaited reader's guide to this treasure trove of Freudiana.
Last summer a letter bearing forty-two signatures was sent to the library; the missive succeeded in being both deceptively innocent and outrageously demanding. The writers began by professing a modest concern that the exhibit “adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to intellectual history.” They then had the effrontery to request that their representative, a lawyer who proved to be Swales's attorney, be appointed to the exhibits planning committee.
Among the forty-two signatories, later swelled to fifty-two, were a few analysts and some respected historians of analysis, but to the experienced eye the effort seemed to be led by such well-known anti-Freudians as Crews, Swales, and Gloria Steinern. Oliver Sacks was perhaps the best-known name, a puzzling entry because he is known to be friendly to analysis. Others were Europeans who may not have known the polemical uses to which their names would be put.
Why the library suddenly postponed the exhibit remains a mystery. Several articles appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post in December and early January, in which the embarrassed library attempted to explain the postponement, attributing it to a shortage of funds. This was not at all convincing, as the opening was scheduled for December 1996, a full year away. A few courageous
editorials and op-ed pieces saw print, including an eloquent column by Anthony Lewis in the Times, protesting the library's cave-in. In early January the APA Newsletter published the protests of the APA president and a laudable recantation by Sacks, who “bridled at being linked to the angry anti-Freudians,” regretted lending his signature, and blamed himself for being “ingenuous” Irene Burnham, project director at the library, was quoted as saying she had written to the letter's signatories and received replies from seventeen, fourteen of whom urged that the exhibit proceed as planned. A well-known historian of analysis withdrew his name because the petition “has clearly become an excuse for entirely indiscriminate Freud-bashing” Burnham herself expressed the hope that the exhibit would go forward “in the way that it should” Eminent analysts including Harold Blum, executive director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and a member of the board of consultants for the exhibit, have deplored the postponement, as have Jerry Wiener and Harold Eist, analysts prominent in the APA. As far away as Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung criticized the library's “self-censorship.”
As analysts, we sincerely hope the Freud exhibit will proceed. As ordinary citizens, we are more concerned about the assaults on the Library of Congress than about the attacks on analysis, which over the past century has withstood the onslaughts of far more serious detractors. There is, however, a recent pattern of surrender to the forces of political darkness and obscurantism that is disquieting, from the Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie to congressional opposition to the Smithsonian exhibit marking the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In another instance, the Royal Academy in London, in preparing an exhibit of African art, came under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists.
The Library of Congress followed the postponement of the Freud exhibit with another craven surrender, one even more unnecessary. An exhibit about the life of slaves on antebellum plantations, based on oral histories collected by the WPA, was abruptly withdrawn on the very day it opened, when some black employees of the library were shocked to see a picture of slaves in the cottonfields beneath a white master on horseback. The exhibit had been shown in five other cities and a Black college to general acclaim, and a well-known African American advisor to the exhibit protested the closing. Fortunately, the Martin Luther King Library in Washington was able to rescue the exhibit and show it to an interested public.
This hypersensitivity to the slightest suggestion of controversy by the Library of Congress suggests bureaucratic timidity, even a state bordering on panic among its administrators. Surely self-censorship is beneath the dignity of the library, which should be free to present and interpret its historical holdings as it sees fit. When such a colossus strains at a gnat, should we suspect unseen political pressures? In the Enola Gay affair, the Smithsonian was subjected to heavy political pressure, and superpatriots in Congress threatened to cut its funds. As for the Freud exhibit, its critics have no such political constituency, but might not a right-wing religious fanatic, for example, have reached the ear of some philistine congressman? Has some politician heard that the library was being used to celebrate the life and works of Sigmund Freud, that “godless Jew” who explored the sex lives of innocent children? We have no evidence of this kind of influence, but in times like these almost anything can happen.