Sigmund Freud made his one and only visit to the United States in 1909, 100 years ago. He arrived on August 29, and he departed on Sept. 21 from a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. He finally arrived back in Vienna on October 2. A century after the trip was completed, on October 3-4, 2009, a symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine will offer “After Freud Left: Centennial Reflections on His 1909 Visit to the United States.”
Psychoanalysis flourished among Americans more than anywhere else in the world. The symposium participants will explore Freud's North American legacy. He once remarked mischievously that he left the Americans “a virus.” What happened with the virus is an historical question, and the speakers will combine the history of psychoanalysis and American intellectual history, offering perspectives to illuminate thoughtfully the larger interactions of Freud's teachings with practice, institutions, and culture.
The speakers represent fresh, twenty-first-century scholarship in the history of psychoanalysis and its cultural context. Several of the presenters are conspicuous in the current “New Freud Studies” movement. Scheduled speakers are Ernst Falzeder and Hale Usak from Austria, Sonu Shamdasani and Richard Skues from the UK, and from the United States, Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross. I am working with the New York Academy of Medicine as the outside organizer. Major funding comes from the Foundation for Idiodynamics, Personality Theory and the Creative Individual, based in St. Louis, with substantial assistance from the Austrian Cultural Forum of New York.
It is only fair to ask: Why make so much of Freud's expedition to the United States? The answer may not be obvious to people who see psychoanalysis from the inside: Freud's visit has become one of the iconic events in American history. Every basic college textbook in U.S. history, regardless of the author's approach, still includes a mention of the visit as a symbol of cultural change. The visit provides the means by which American historians remind a very general audience of the importance of Freud's ideas and the power of those ideas.
Most of the detailed past accounts of the visit focus on Freud's personal experiences in the New World. He was impressed by the skyscrapers. He had great difficulty with the public toilet facilities: “They escort you along miles of corridors and ultimately you are taken to the very basement where a marble palace awaits you, only just in time.” Above all, Freud found that his digestion was thrown off. He even believed at one point that he may have had a small attack of recurring appendicitis. In any event, the diet he was fed in America caused him constant unhappiness, the memory of which stayed with him the rest of his life.
Another set of historical accounts traces Freud's continuing criticism of Americans and their culture. The usual story is that, conditioned by his unhappy culinary experiences, Freud was at best ambivalent about the United States or, more often, hostile or contemptuous. Many of his comments were truly “dyspeptic.” Ernest Jones quoted Freud's later remark, which has in turn been much quoted: “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.” But for a while, at least, Freud also had other thoughts. Four weeks after his return, he wrote to his British colleague, “The memory of the trip becomes more and more wonderful.”
In any event, speakers at the October symposium will take a new look at what happened “After Freud Left.” Indeed, because of the symbolism of the visit, it is safe to say that the symposium itself will be a significant event in American psychoanalysis and culture in general.
To publicize the symposium, on Sept. 21, the 100th anniversary of when Freud left the New World and boarded the North German Lloyd Line luxury steamer, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, there will be a media event in Hoboken on the site of the departure pier. It will be preceded by a preparatory lecture at the Hoboken Historical Society on September 20. Another media event is planned at the Freud Museum in Vienna for October 2, the day when 100 years ago Freud once again reached his home at 19 Berggasse.
John Burnham, Ph.D., is research professor of history and (by courtesy) professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University. He is the author of many books and articles on the history of psychoanalysis and related subjects.
The best news is that it will be free and open to the public, and members and associates of the American Psychoanalytic Association will be especially welcome. Details are available on the New York Academy of Medicine Web site (, click on events, then conferences). While registration is free, one can also sign up for a luncheon on the premises on Saturday (for which there will be a fee).