The Freud Exhibit at The Library of Congress is proceeding according to plan. It is scheduled to open October 15, 1998. “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” will examine Freud's life, work, and cultural influences.
Freud's theories will be presented and explored both within the context of his own era and from the perspective of a century of psychoanalytic thought and intellectual discourse. The exhibit will survey Freud's importance in the history of ideas, his fundamental contribution to understanding the human mind, and his pervasive influence upon our perceptions of the individual personality, group process, society, and culture.
Current plans call for the exhibit to be housed in an elegant, newly refurbished gallery of the Library of Congress for several months until January 16, 1999. It is expected to be one of the most significant educational and popular exhibitions ever presented at the library. The exhibit will travel to the Jewish Museum in New York City, to the Getty Museum in California, and then to the Freud Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Freud's theories and insights have all too often been diluted, distorted, and bowdlerized. The aim of the exhibit will be to present Freud as accurately as possible, using unaltered historical, biographical, and scientific documents. The exhibit will also make use of the library's vast holdings of Freud material, much of which was donated by the Sigmund Freud Archives to the Library of Congress over the course of some 40 years. This unparalleled Freud collection at the library will be augmented in the exhibit by selected material from the Freud Museum in Vienna and the Freud Museum in London.
The wealth of material should afford a lively, stimulating, and educational experience for the visiting public. Controversies concerning Freud's ideas and influence during his lifetime and his contested legacies, as well as his enduring impact upon 20th-century thought, will also be highlighted in the exhibit. The exhibit will have its own catalog, and a symposium is planned with presentations of scholarly papers about Freud from different perspectives and points of view.
Funds for the exhibit have come primarily from private sources. The library continues to seek additional funding to underwrite the complete exhibition. The next issue of TAP will offer a more detailed description of the Freud exhibit and its related programs, activities, and publications.