Exhibition Review

"What peg will I use to hook this exhibit to American history and write about it for the JAH?" I thought, as I hurried out of therapy and onto the San Diego Expressway to get to the Skirball Cultural Center in time to see "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture." The exhibit was originally curated for the Library of Congress by Michael S. Roth, a European intellectual historian who at the time was associate director of the Getty Research Institute. From the Library of Congress, the exhibit went to the Jewish Museum in New York City, then to the Austrian National Library, then to the Skirball, which focuses on Jewish life in America; it is subsequently scheduled at two museums in Brazil and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (fall 2001).	1
To begin with, the provenance of the exhibit locates it squarely in the United States. Most of the materials on view in the exhibit are manuscripts and photos from the extensive Freud collection of the Library of Congress, listed at approximately eighty thousand items. The first gift of Freud materials came from the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York. The location of the Freud Archives in New York City is an indication of the institutional strength of psychoanalysis in the United States. American psychoanalysis was itself built in two waves: in the first, dating from Freud's early and influential trip to the United States in 1909, psychoanalysis took root within the medical profession and kept relatively separate from European psychoanalysis; the second, made up of European Jewish refugees from the Third Reich, included such influential figures as Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, and Bruno Bettelheim and reflected Freud's substantial interest in cultural criticism and not just individual diagnosis. Roth's own organization of the exhibit emphasizes that critical dimension of psychoanalysis.	2
The other major donor to the Library of Congress was Sigmund Freud's daughter, the child psychoanalyst Anna Freud. Her donation, which included photos and more personal items, made the Library of Congress the major holder of Freud materials inthe world. In his foreword to the collection of essays that Roth edited to accompany the exhibit, Librarian of Congress James Billington quotes Anna Freud as selecting the American repository for her father's papers because "they would be safe there." She was referring, presumably, to the near obliteration of these materials, indeed of her family itself, by the Nazis, from whom Freud and his possessions narrowly escaped when he fled from Vienna to London after the Anschluss in 1938. The Holocaust looms over this show—and not just at the Jewish venues—as it does in Roth's understanding of the deepest meanings of Freud's life and work.	. . .