At last the long-postponed exhibit “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” opened at the Library of Congress on October 15, 1998. There is no need to review the brouhaha at its cancellation (see TAP 30/2), except to remind ourselves that this occurred in the winter of 1995. The Library's explanation was lack of funds, a mere $300,000 still to be raised. It was emphatically not giving in to the revisionist critics whose petition complained that the proposed exhibit was biased toward mainstream psychoanalysis, virtually an advertisement for the American Psychoanalytic Association.
The Library's statement was hard to believe because of the long interval for fundraising before the scheduled opening date in September 1996. There was also a disturbing pre-existing pattern of museums giving in to the slightest hint of controversy, as in the Enola Gay affair at the Smithsonian and yielding to Islamic fundamentalists in the Royal Academy in London.
At the press preview on a rainy October 8, a representative of the Library of Congress gave a friendly welcome to fifteen or twenty journalists and introduced the guest curator for the exhibit, Michael S. Roth of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. A young man, Hollywood-handsome with an engaging manner, he gave a bland, semi-humorous account of the five years that the exhibit has been in preparation. Like the Library representative before him, he stuck to the original story about a lack of funds. He thanked his fellow scholars for their helpful suggestions and criticisms and reiterated that the exhibit was intended neither to support nor to criticize Freud but to convey a picture of his life, its historical context, and his influence on the twentieth century.
Roth invited questions from the audience. The first speaker asked what changes had been made in the exhibit compared to the original plans. Hard to answer, Roth replied, since the criticisms came before the exhibit existed — it had been in the planning stages. He had talked with the critics, who were helpful, and he had added a section about controversies. (Not entirely true, since there were enough preliminary plans for the critics to complain about, and these had already included a section called “Disputed Legacies.”) Asked about pressure from the analytic community, which the critics had warned him to expect, Roth said that such pressure had never materialized and the few letters from analysts were mostly friendly and helpful. What about the long-promised catalogue and readers' guide to the vast psychoanalytic holdings of the Library of Congress? This would be too big an undertaking at this time. As for a small catalogue of the current exhibit, there had been no plans for one. Roth referred us to the “companion volume” for the exhibit, bearing the same name as the exhibit, edited by him, and published by Knopf; it is a collection of interesting essays, but it is not a catalogue.
The exhibit itself occupies a single large room in the main Jefferson Building. In the currently fashionable style, there was low-level illumination — in this case so low that one could barely read some of the labels, much less Freud's Gothic script. The materials are arranged in twelve narrow wood-paneled cubicles, from “Formative Years” to “Society Crises.” Movies show continuously running movies between each cubicle, from Secrets of a Soul (1923) to The Seven Percent Solution (1976), as well as some rare footage from the earliest years of film, like The Somnambulist of 1903. (There is also a series of quotations mounted on the walls, reflecting various opinions of Freud's work, but these escaped this reviewer's notice.)
Among the exhibits of manuscripts, photographs, and artifacts, there are extraordinarily interesting and unusual single items: Martha Bernay's engagement book, the Freud family Bible with Freud's father's entry at Sigmund's birth, Freud's letter to Fliess renouncing the seduction theory, and the Wolf Man's sketch of the famous tree with wolves, among others. Many antiquities collected by Freud were exhibited, from Paleolithic hand-axes to a polychrome Greek vase depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx. The period photographs of Vienna and the university area (lent by the Freud Museum in Vienna) and the Engelmann photographs of Freud's apartment just before his departure for London were exceptionally good, but there was a dearth of contemporary maps. Some of the objects had not yet been installed when the exhibit opened, like the replica of Freud's couch.
The captions for the exhibits are uniformly bland and simplified, and sometimes misleading, apparently in an attempt to eliminate anything controversial. Roth acknowledged that the labels had been rewritten many times. The complex cocaine episode, for example, is summed up in five lines that implied that Freud learned about cocaine from the ophthalmologist Koller rather than the other way around. The labels' statement that Freud “live[d] a secular life while continuing to identify himself as a Jew” is correct but de-emphasizes the vigor with which Freud rejected all religions, including Judaism. The entries on “Death and Aggression” and “What do Women Want?” seem oversimplified, the first lacking the symmetry of Eros and Thanatos as biological drives. And to call penis-envy “[women's] self-perception of being a failed boy” is also correct but euphemistic.
Emerging from the last dark cubicle into the light, one is surprised to come to the end of the exhibit so quickly, with a sense of “is that all there is?” Fascinating as the individual items were, as one would expect from the 45,000 manuscripts, photographs, and films from the Library of Congress's unique collections, one craves something more. Perhaps the controversies about the postponement, and the five years of preparation, inevitably created excessive expectations.