The Freud Exhibit at The Library of Congress is now officially scheduled to open to the public on October 15, 1998. 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 contributions to the understanding of the human mind, and his pervasive influence on our perceptions of the individual personality, group process, society, and culture.
Life Magazine recently assigned sixteenth place to Freud in the 100 most important individuals of this millennium and the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams as a central event in the millennium. Freud's dark vision of the struggle between the demands of civilization and the demands of the instinctual drives, and his elucidation of progressive development and regressive tendencies in the personality, remain the subjects of continuing discourse and highly relevant to contemporary concerns.
Freud's formulations and theories have all too often been diluted and distorted. There were many Freuds at different phases of his analytic and life experience and many Freuds in varied representations of his theories and thought. Plans for the exhibit, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” have elicited conflicts, controversy, and opposition reflecting those that have surrounded the development of psychoanalysis. Efforts at censorship of the exhibit were probably predictable in historical context!
A major aim of the exhibit will be to present Freud as accurately as possible, letting him speak for himself through unaltered historical, scientific, and biographical documents. The core of the exhibit will come from the library's vast holdings of Freud material, most of which was donated by the Sigmund Freud Archives to the Library of Congress over the course of some 45 years. This unparalleled collection continues to grow through new donations.
The Freud exhibit will be presented in an elegant, newly refurbished gallery of the Library of Congress through January 15, 1999. It will then travel to the Jewish Museum in New York City, where it may be seen from April 11 through August 8, 1999. The exhibit will then go to Vienna, Austria, where Freud will be honored during the celebration of the millennium. The exhibit will remain in Vienna from November 11, 1999, through February 10, 2000. It will reside in the new Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Calif., from March 7 through May 21, 2000. It is anticipated that a Latin American venue for the Freud exhibit will be found in Brazil, where it would go after it leaves the Getty Museum.
The exhibit will have its own catalog. A symposium in Washington 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, including the Lotte Kohler Foundation and The American Psychoanalytic Foundation.
“Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” will have three major parts. “Historical/Biographical” will cover Freud's formative years in late-nineteenth-century Vienna, showing how major political and cultural events affected his intellectual development. “From the Conscious to the Unconscious” will introduce the key concepts in psychoanalytic theory, including the interpretation of dreams and repression, and will show how Freud used those concepts in treating some of his patients. The psychoanalytic mode of interpretation and the search for concealed desires will be emphasized as central to psychoanalytic inquiry and as part of our common culture. The exhibit will also address the development of the “talking cure” as a means of coming to terms with one's past. “From the Psyche to Civilization” will show how Freud applied his ideas of individual human psychology to society and culture. The exhibit will explore Freud's theories of the violent origin of civilization and the function of religion, art, and science in contemporary society. This third section will also attempt to show how Freud's ideas have become diffused in professional psychoanalysis and throughout cultural arenas from the arts to the sciences. Finally, it will address the contested legacies of Freud's psychoanalysis, attempting to “leave viewers with a sense of how issues Freud explored remain vital for us,” in the words of the Library of Congress release describing the exhibit.