Conscious of His Impact

Even Homer Simpson, America’s animated everyman, has an appreciation for the theories of Sigmund Freud. He explains to daughter Lisa: “The important thing is for your mother to repress what happened, push it deep down inside her so she’ll never annoy us again.”

Sitcoms, magazines and advertising routinely co-opt Freud’s well-known theories: psychoanalysis, Oedipal complexes, Freudian slips, anal-retentiveness, defense mechanisms, the id, the ego and the superego.

The exhibit “Freud: Conflict and Culture” lays out the beginnings of these notions and their popular influences. In glass cases are Freud’s handwritten manuscripts, with some translation. Next to them are TV monitors showing video clips, from silent films to “The Simpsons.”

Seems simple enough. But hidden in the subconscious of the exhibit, which opened Tuesday at the Skirball Cultural Center, is the criticism that dogged Freud during his career, and the controversies that linger over his work to this day.

The exhibit was curated by Michael S. Roth, the associate director of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities until his appointment last month as president of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

But back when he got involved with “Freud: Conflict and Culture” in 1993, Roth was a professor at Claremont Graduate School. During his sabbatical, he sat in on a brainstorming session at the Library of Congress. The library has the preeminent archive of Freud materials and was looking for ideas on how to build an exhibit around them. Roth was surprised that he was invited back, especially after he voiced his first idea: Design the exhibit on two levels--the conscious upstairs and the ground floor filled with dirt so that visitors would be digging around in the unconscious.

The committee members vetoed dirt in the library, but they liked Roth. He’d published a book titled “Psychoanalysis and Its History” in 1987, but he wasn’t affiliated with any particular school of thinking on Freud--factions he would become all too familiar with in the years to come.

A cultural historian, Roth approached Freud as a man who raised important questions rather than one who concocted cures and made predictions.

“The exhibition is built on this premise that Freud was most concerned with making sense of the past. And its second premise is that Freud is part of our past. So if you’re going to make sense of our past, you have to deal with Freud.”

The first of three segments in “Conflict and Culture” concentrates on Freud’s formative years. He was born in Freiberg, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), in 1856. While he was still a small child, his family moved to Leipzig and then to Vienna, where Freud would spend nearly all of his professional career. He left Berggasse 19--his office for nearly 50 years--only after the Nazis annexed Austria.

During those 50 years, Freud developed the techniques of free association and dream interpretation to try to access the unconscious mind. These and his other theories--about repression, transference, sexuality and aggression--are laid out in the second area of “Conflict and Culture.”

Paring down Freud’s work into one exhibit requires a certain amount of shorthand. Roth coped by focusing on the questions Freud asked--hoping that those are questions that will also interest museum-goers. “Like: What is the relationship between desire and identity, or sexual preference and one’s history? Those are questions that remain important and interesting,” Roth said. “Freud had views about those questions, and we may reject those views, but the questions, and the way he posed them, are still very much a part of our conversation today.”

Freud’s Concepts in ‘Spellbound,’ ‘Simpsons’

Demonstrating how deeply Freud’s concepts have seeped into popular thinking, each theory is illustrated with film and television clips, including Homer Simpson’s take on repression. Others bits range from the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Spellbound” to Woody Woodpecker cartoons, from “Get Smart” to “The Bob Newhart Show.”

The videos, which have proved popular at each stop of the exhibit, remind visitors how much they know about Freud’s theories already. “In order to follow your favorite sitcom, or cartoon, you have to understand these concepts to get the jokes. And you always get the joke,” Roth said. “Some people said these [clips] would trivialize Freud. That he’s a big thinker. A deep thinker. . . . I think that ‘Simpsons’ moment is about as smart a take on Freud as exists in America.”

Psychoanalysis took particular hold in America in the first half of the 20th century, and the last portion of the exhibit deals with that expansion, the movement’s dissidents and other critics. Freud began extrapolating his theories into broader philosophies, generally concluding that societies, like individuals, are full of conflicting and suppressed desires that result in radical disruptions.

Hitler had invaded Poland just three weeks before Freud died in 1939 in exile in London. The man who sought to cure neuroses of all kinds could never kick his own cigar habit, and suffered for years from cancer of the jaw. Freud’s doctor gave the 83-year-old a lethal dose of morphine.

The intensity of the disagreement over Freud’s theories--even 55 year after his death--became clear during the gestation of “Freud: Conflict and Culture.”

Peter Swales, a historian of psychoanalysis known for asserting that Freud seduced his sister-in-law, got wind of the scheduled exhibit through an acquaintance working at the Library of Congress. Concerned that his and other views disparaging Freud would be swept aside, Swales mailed out a petition stating that the show should “adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud’s contributions.” About 50 people signed it, including Oliver Sacks, Gloria Steinem and Frederick Crews, the author and editor of two recent anti-Freud volumes.

“The petition was probably something I would have signed,” Roth said with a laugh eased by a five-year distance from the event.

The climate in 1995, however, was charged by the recent scaling-back of a Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay bombing and other cases of museum backpedaling. Academia, too, was deep into battles over political correctness. When word came late that year that “Freud: Conflict and Culture” was being delayed for at least 12 months, Roth was disheartened.

James Billington, the librarian of Congress, has always maintained that the postponement had nothing to do with the petition or other complaints. No matter how it appeared, he said, the delay was caused by the need to raise enough funds from private sources. Library exhibits are not paid for with public funds.

“There were a lot of people who said we shouldn’t do it. There were some that questioned whether taxpayer money should even be spent housing Freud’s collection. And the more protest you have like that, the firmer your stand is,” Billington said.

But as the months dragged on, even Roth got nervous.

“After a while, it became clear to me that Freud was not the issue here. Freud will survive all of these critics. . . . Here was an exhibit postponed and being threatened with indefinite postponement on the basis of the objections of publicity-seeking critics who had no idea what was in the show. They were self-consciously manipulating professional colleagues in order to stop something that they imagined they would disagree with when it came out.

“That, I thought, was a dangerous political tendency that was not about Freud but about our public culture.”

So he met with Billington, ready to resign as curator if the library didn’t set a date for the show. But Billington needed no persuading. He set a date. “Freud: Conflict and Culture,” first slated for December 1996, finally opened in October 1998.

Looking back, Billington insists that the show was never at risk of cancellation.

Swales says his petition was not an attempt to get the show axed. The negative effects of Freudianism aren’t in the exhibit, but he’s gratified that the opponents “put it on the record that we thought it was a load of [expletive].” Swales didn’t go to see the show, either. “I didn’t bother,” he said. “It’d be a bit like inviting a gourmet to go eat at McDonald’s.”

As for Roth, he came away feeling that it all turned out OK. “Maybe the show isn’t worthy of the moment,” he said. “But we were able to stand on principle and do a show we feel good about. That’s a good precedent.”

Everyone stuck to his guns. Not much changed. Except one thing: Now a lot of people had heard about a little exhibit called “Freud: Conflict and Culture.”

“People actually said, ‘Did you engineer this controversy at the beginning of the show?’ Because it’s been so helpful for attendance,” Roth said. Certainly visitors arrived at the Library of Congress, and later at the Jewish Museum in New York, looking for the source of all this brouhaha. Some, no doubt, left disappointed.

The dozen glass cases hardly seem filled with anything radical, especially by today’s art world standards. The largest items re-create his office: his desk chair, an analyst’s couch covered with a rug.

Above each document case is a quotation about Freud, such as Frederick Crews’, from 1988: “Freud was already a pseudoscientist from the hour he published ‘The Interpretation of Dreams.’ ” Or French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s, from 1980: “How can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give birth to a world wide institution?”

It may not satisfy anti-Freudians, but the setup works: the origin of the theories below, the questions about them still hanging overhead.

Dr. Peter Kramer, a psychiatrist and professor working in Providence, R.I., contributed an essay to the book published in conjunction with the exhibit. He said he likes the density of the show and the way it weaves history and popular culture but remains ambivalent about its subject. Freud took brave career risks to search for what he thought was the truth, Kramer said. On the other hand, he was blind--or willfully turned a blind eye--to the shortcomings in his own research.

“What’s interesting is how many of the details are wrong, or we don’t believe. We don’t think sexual drives are the main or sole motivating force in childhood development. We think attachment is more important, probably.” But, Kramer said, “Public awareness is very sensible. It’s not like penis envy is Freud’s legacy. It’s more things like character armor or unconscious motivation that have survived. And sexual drives.”

Freud Had His Own Response to Critics

Toward the end of his career, Freud was trying to shape his legacy, in part by discrediting his critics. In one letter, Freud responds to Carl Jung’s accusation that he treats his followers like patients by suggesting that Jung is neurotic.

“His late texts, the more he knows, the more skeptical he became about your ability to really know anyone,” Roth said. “He didn’t think people had better methods than his. . . . [But] he had this weird combination of skepticism and arrogance.”

In the last panel is a photograph of Freud reading into a BBC microphone. There is copy of the handwritten manuscript he was reading. And coming from a speaker is the strained sound of Freud’s voice, speaking with great difficulty because of the cancer. The words are vaguely audible throughout the gallery, but only when a visitor is standing at the last panel do the speaker’s identity and meaning become clear.

“I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on,” Freud reads, in slow, deliberate English. “People did not believe my facts and thought my ideas unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building of an International Psychoanalytic Assn. But the struggle is not over yet.”

Certainly the statement sums things up. For Roth, the sound wafting through the museum is also a metaphor for all of “Freud: Conflict and Culture.”

“Whether you know it or not, Freud is in the air,” Roth said. “It may not be a good thing, actually. Some people don’t like it; some visitors think, ‘What the hell is that? Why do I have to hear that?’ But there it is. It’s in our language, in the air we breathe. And the way in which you can come to terms with something, even to reject it . . . is by paying attention to it.

“That, of course, is a very Freudian notion.”

BE THERE

“Freud: Conflict and Culture” at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. $8; $6, seniors and students; free, ages 12 and younger. Ends July 25. (310) 440-4500.