Psychoanalysis and Democracy

...To be sure, psychoanalysis has been in crisis since it was born...

...Unless the analysts aggressively challenge the presuppositions of the bureaucrats they will not only lose the fight, but their souls as well...

...The debate over how to memorialize the Holocaust is not only about the behavior of certain individuals or countries during the Second World War and the way they should be remembered...

...It isn't just that we don't have the leisure to pause and reflect because of the intensified pressures of making a living...

...He told her that there was no disadvantage to being a homosexual and that many of the great men in history had been gay...

...Yet it could well have been a commemorative occasion...

...When I pressed Swales—who has gone to considerable lengths to prove that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law—on the question, he adamantly denied the existence of a psychoanalytic unconscious...

...Cornelius Castoriadis—whose work is beginning to get the attention it deserves in this country—calls the other main tendency of modern societies "the project of the unlimited expansion of 'rational' mastery...

...Although it is naïve to think that one can directly derive a democratic program—or any political program—from psychoanalysis, we can say that the totalitarian temptation consists in the impulse to reassert omnipotence on an individual or collective level...

...Perpetual Crisis Everyone I talked to insisted that the Freud exhibition—which moves to New York's Jewish Museum this spring—wasn't intended to commemorate any anniversary having to do with Freud or psychoanalysis...

...Like most crises, the current upheavals in psychoanalysis contain the potential for growth...

...The turmoil we are witnessing is, among other things, the result of the breakdown of a longestablished and relatively ossified intellectual and professional paradigm...

...Psychoanalysis shares an appreciation of the irrational with certain contemporary critics of the Enlightenment...

...I interviewed Irene Chambers, the Library's director of interpretive programs, a sincere, self-described "museum professional," who is as puzzled by the proliferation of postmodern thought as she is perplexed by the politicization of her field...

...The changes brought about by the Reagan revolution and the new deregulated capitalism are, to put it mildly, not conducive to self-reflection...

...The Freudian establishment in America has done a lot to stir up negative transferences...

...Freud's attitude toward female psychology and sexuality is full of contradictions...

...As in so many other fields, the rejection of positivism has led to a fuzzy hermeneutical or postmodern relativism...

...On the one side, there is his famous letter to the worried mother of a homosexual man that was remarkably advanced and enlightened for its time...

...And they both turn to Totem and Taboo, generally thought to be Freud's most reactionary work, to make their point...

...66 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...Only then can its second hundred years be as creative as its first...

...By demonstrating the depth, scope, and power of unconscious mental processes and the ubiquity of transference in all human relations, he fundamentally transformed the received view of human nature...

...They also wanted to prove to their medical colleagues that they were scientifically kosher...

...Revisions The rise of the women's movement—and, following that, of the gay and lesbian movements— was the biggest single challenge to psychoanalysis and perhaps the critical development that sent its stock plummeting...

...This "project of autonomy" emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the democratic and secular fight against absolutism and religion...

...Nor should it receive the intellectual imprimatur of the Library of Congress, one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the United States...

...Similarly, the almost exclusive focus on Freud's early formulations and Case Histories by the "revisionist" historians and philosophers of science is also guided by an odd assumption: to invalidate this work would undermine the credibility of current psychoanalytic theory and practice...

...They tend to focus on the act of patricide and ignore the pact between the brothers, with its potentially democratic message...

...Each side made its case in terms of freedom of speech...

...He explained, "It was as though the Library of Congress were to enlist R. J. Reynolds and Company to organize a show on the history of tobacco...

...62 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 WHEN PSYCHOANALYSTS maintain their commitment to analysis through an idealization of Freud or defend their ideas—or any ideas, for that matter—dogmatically, they are not consistent with their own principles...

...He argued, moreover, that taxpayers' dollars should not be used to fund an enterprise that was necessarily unscientific and biased...

...An additional factor is the new policies of the insurance companies and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)—themselves part of the brutal rationalization of capitalist economies that has occurred over the last couple of decades...

...After the intermezzo of the sixties, outward-directed values, that is, moneymaking and the pursuit of status and celebrity, have been largely reinstated as the highest goods...

...Finally, when Lear's "The Shrink Is In" appeared in the New Republic in December of 1995, "there was," as Janet Malcolm observed, "an almost audible sigh of relief among those who had found the attacks preposterous, but had figured out no way to answer them...

...Many of the criticisms— concerning its scientific validity, therapeutic effectiveness, and treatment of women and gays—are not new...

...As a nineteenth-century paterfamilias, however, he was unable to live up to the task he had set himself...

...Like another well-known critic of psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault, Swales claims, in short, that the unconscious is an "iatrogenic" phenomenon...

...For the years 1995 to 2000 contain the centennial anniversaries of all the important events in the creation of psychoanalysis, beginning with the publication of Studies in Hysteria (1895) and culminating with the Interpretation of Dreams (1900...

...And psychoanalysis explicitly teaches the dangers of omnipotence, thus tempering our grandiosity by engendering "a certain humility," as Lear puts it, in the face of the irrational...

...In the most general terms, the current political situation in the democratic capitalist world is defined by the contest between these two projects...

...At one point in our extended discussion she asked me: "Why isn't it possible to just have an 'objective' exhibit...

...The moving force behind the petition was Swales, a controversial independent historian of early psychoanalysis, who contended that the exhibit was nothing more than a trade show on the part of the psychoanalytic establishment designed to polish up its badly tarnished public image...

...Lear was able to undercut the Freud critics' position so effectively because he made no bones about it: psychoanalysis is "the first therapy that sets freedom rather than some specific image of human happiness as its goal...

...Where the capitalist market provides the dynamic motor for potentially unlimited expansion, modern quantifying science provides a form of rationalization that is progressively imposed on all realms of existence...

...Indeed, through its active engagement and working through of the irrational, psychoanalysis could even help to formulate a deeper vision of democracy...

...The fortytwo signatories identified themselves as scholars who had made significant contributions to Freud studies, and who worked "independently of one another," sharing "no common doctrinal commitment or institutional affiliation...

...The explosion in the use of psychotropic medication over the last decade has also changed the landscape dramatically— not only as a competitor to psychoanalysis, but to the talking therapies in general...

...As professional colleagues, they were treated as pariahs and barred from mainstream training institutes because of their supposed "character disorders...

...Since the schizoidal and uptight analyst of the fifties and sixties has often been caricatured in popular culture, and the conservatism of postwar psychoanalysis criticized by others, I won't go into that here...

...Once this project is established, no "representations of the tribe" can be immune from criticism, even if mythical ancestors, God, natural law, or historical necessity supposedly sanction them...

...Both Castoriadis and Lear see omnipotence as the major psychological obstacle to democracy...

...It remains to be seen, however, whether the image of psychoanalysis as a bastion of homophobic prejudice can be revised...

...This in turn might help to overcome the limitations of both the postmodern rejection of the democratic ideal and the liberal defense of it in purely procedural terms...

...However, psychoanalysis hasn't been able to come up with an alternative methodological account of itself...

...Most insurance companies will only reimburse patients for a small number of sessions, and many policies explicitly exclude any sort of "insight-oriented" treatment...

...The Library decided to play it safe: to postpone, not cancel, the exhibit, supposedly because of a shortfall in fund-raising—a claim that has generally been met with skepticism...

...However, where those critics often "pour scorn on the democratic ideal," analysis does not...

...Indeed, these extra-human sanctions are themselves no longer recognized as legitimate...

...By setting himself the radical task of examining sexuality "scientifically," which is to say, without social prejudices, he broke with the Victorian culture of his day and opened the way for the emancipatory sexual movements of this century...

...With the anti-authoritarian turn of the sixties, the authoritarianism, arrogance and insularity that characterized much of American psychoanalysis would no longer wash—either with psychoanalytic candidates, patients, or the public...

...As Lear points out, "it's a mistake to think that psychoanalysis and Prozac are two different means to the same end...

...And while ideological potshots are still fired in Freud's direction, some of the most important feminist theorists—most notably, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, and Elisabeth YoungBreuhl—are practicing psychoanalysts...

...Like the Freud bashers, many analysts themselves have made a direct, if tacit, equation between the man and his work...

...Given the fact that there is no longer a solid consensus about the core constituents of our collective identity and the widespread skepticism over notions of truth and objectivity, who should have the power to decide how our history is going to be officially recorded...

...Unfortunately, many analysts accept the criteria of the National Institute for Mental Health and the insurance companies and try to argue that analysis is as effective as other forms of psychotherapy or medication...

...According to Lear's diagnosis, "obsessing about Freud the man is a way of keeping Freud the meaning at bay...

...But this approach ignores the simple fact that not only the field as a whole but Freud himself progressed far beyond its necessarily primitive beginnings...

...THE CURRENT hostility toward psychoanalysis is not only the result of external factors...

...The analyst's "impossible" skill—like the good teacher's—consists, as Castoriadis notes, in his or her ability to "develop the self-activity of the subject by using, so to speak, this very self-activity...

...After the primal father— who had the right to possess sexually all the women and to freely murder his adversaries— has been removed and the pact established, no one can re-occupy the vacated position of omnipotence...

...The organizers insisted that they hadn't changed their approach to the exhibit as a reDISSENT / Spring 1999 n 59 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY suit of the controversy, though several of them admitted that it prompted them to sharpen their thinking and take more care with the presentations...

...That this approach was destined to fail became apparent in 1958 at a famous symPSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY posium on psychoanalysis and scientific method that Sidney Hook organized at New York University in which the analysts proved unable to defend themselves against the hardnosed philosophers of science...

...In other words, behind much of the research into the minutiae and sometimes unappealing sides of Freud's life, behind the attempt to discredit him personally, his detractors seek to invalidate his claim that human beings are "complex psychological organisms that generate layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their understanding...

...By the time organized psychoanalysis woke up to this fact, it had lost much of its prestige...

...This is one of the deepest meanings of democracy...

...Along with the confusion comes the opportunity for original thinking...

...DISSENT / Spring 1999 65 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY Bold thinking will, however, be required for the field to resolve the crisis in a productive way and regain its vitality...

...Again, conflicting viewpoints can be found within Freud's thinking on the subject...

...Indeed, the last twenty years have witnessed a new and fertile interchange between psychoanalysis and feminism...

...At its best, psychoanalysis continues to pursue a process of open-ended interrogation, which, among other things, questions the cherished assumptions of psychoanalysis itself...

...An unconscious, in the Freudian sense," he argued, "has no real existence, but is actually induced by the psychoanalytic séance...

...Whether or not you like it—indeed, whether or not you can say exactly what it consists in—it is hard to deny "the fact of Freud," that is, the massive transformation he effected in what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century...

...This is one of the reasons there is such a strong compulsion in the field to idealize Freud and shield his work from criticism—an exercise that has tended at times to give psychoanalysis the aura of a religious sect...

...However, the organization officially renounced discrimination against homosexuals in 1992 and has gone a remarkably long way to acknowledge and correct its former mistakes...

...This historical undertaking, which also began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, involves the amalgamation of the newly liberated capitalist economy with technical rationality...

...Indeed, our whole sense of time is in the process of being accelerated and transformed...

...The antipositivist movements that followed the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1962 also caused psychoanalysis to lose much of its legitimacy as a science...

...Instead, psychoanalysis must have the courage to explain and justify itself as a sui generis theoretical and practical enterprise that synthesizes elements from natural science, philosophy, medicine, religion, and traditional healing practices...

...It is precisely this fact that the critics want to dislodge...

...The pursuit of autonomy is a very inefficient and unprofitable undertaking...

...As the late psychoanalyst and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis argued, psychoanalysis represents a major chapter in "the project of autonomy," which he sees as the right "to put into question" all existing beliefs and values and which he sees as one of the two fundamental and largely antagonistic projects that define modern democratic-capitalist societies...

...AFTER THE dust settled and the exhibition had been rescheduled, this is the "minimal" point the organizers agreed on...

...DESPITE THE use of the term "psychoanalytic technique," psychoanalysis is not a technological enterprise...

...The public generally doesn't like its institutions to remind them of such issues...

...The defenders, on the other hand, decried the petition itself as an attempt at prior restraint in the culture wars...

...The point of analysis is to help patients develop sufficient autonomy to determine their own version of happiness...

...Once this omnipotent "project of mastery" is set in motion, everything—physical and human nature, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY tradition and other values—becomes grist for its mill and is subjected to the maximization of efficiency, productivity, and profit...

...It is no longer controversial to say that his psychology of women is probably the area of his thinking most contaminated by conventional prejudices...

...Here are the facts...

...As Carl Schorske, one of the organizers of the Freud exhibit, has pointed out, a certain "rigorism" has pervaded American intellectual life since the Second World War...

...The early European analysts were, as Freud's daughter, Anna, observed, "the unconventional ones, the doubters, those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge, the odd ones, the dreamers, and those who knew neurotic suffering from their 64 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 own experience...

...Despite the howlers about women, he set in motion a process that others have carried far beyond his own shaky efforts...

...A number of the signers—including Mikkel Borch-Jacobson, Frank Cioffi, Frederick Crews, Adolf Grunbaum, Frank Sulloway, and Peter Swales—have come to be identified either as the leading "Freud bashers" or as the foremost "revisionist theorists of psychoanalysis," depending on whom you talk to...

...In principle everything is open to uncensored examination...

...This requires, as the late psychoanalytic theorist Hans Loewald observed, "an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and individual development...

...The analysts had, to use Freud's famous phrase, succeeded in joining "the compact majority—a group the founder of psychoanalysis never wanted to belong to...

...Nevertheless, because of a new constellation of cultural and socio-economic factors, there is a sense that this time the situation may be more serious, indeed even hopeless...

...But given the subject matter, the cast of characters, and our sensation-hungry press, this couldn't have been otherwise...

...Both the memory wars in Europe and the Freud wars here evoke so much passion because both conflicts bear on our fundamental image of ourselves...

...An approach that is exclusively concerned with the bottom line will of necessity force patients into short-term (often behavioral) therapy or medication because these are much less expensive and supposedly more efficient than psychoanalytically oriented treatment...

...Because the true believers and the radical debunkers are, in this sense, mirror opposites of each other, their "debate" is ultimately sterile...

...Even those individuals who don't accept them are forced to work many more hours because of the reorganization of the economy...

...These alternative therapies generally 6o n DISSENT / Spring 1999 claim to be less expensive and arduous as well as more effective...

...As with the question of female psychology, the psychoanalytic meaning of homosexuality is now the subject of a lively and unrestricted controversy...

...Henceforth, de-centered and equal "citizens" must resolve all conflicts and decisions through negotiation...

...But the exhibit also raised more vexing issues arising out of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the memory wars—similar to those debated in Europe over how the Holocaust should be memorialized...

...There is no longer the time between one event and another that is necessary for the intellectual and psychological working over of experience...

...They also assume that any disparagement of Freud's personality or discrediting of his early theories and techniques poses a threat to the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a whole...

...Until recently, this is exactly what the American Psychoanalytic Association did...

...No subject can be tabooed—by priests, mullahs, rabbis, party functionaries, or training analysts...

...WITH THE rise of the broadside critique of positivism in the 1960s, a strictly scientistic defense of analysis has, with a few exceptions, been all but abandoned...

...Clinically, analysts must stop defining themselves as one among many therapeutic approaches and start insisting that they have something unique to offer, namely autonomy...

...Similarly, analysts must give up the methodological attempt to understand and legitimize themselves in terms of other fields—most notably natural science and medicine...

...Since its glory days in the 1950s, when psychoanalysts dominated psychiatry departments around the country, there has been an enormous proliferation of alternative forms of psychotherapy— many of them spawned by analysis itself...

...Perhaps the most obvious practical reason for the crisis of psychoanalysis has to do with what might be called its "market share...

...The ruckus about the Freud show followed closely on the heels of two other embarrassing controversies concerning federally funded exhibitions—Against Hitler: German Resistance to National Socialism, 1933 - 1945, which was exposed as a propaganda exercise funded by Germany, and the Enola Gay exhibit, which encountered intense opposition from veterans' groups...

...The other brothers will put whoever tries in his place...

...Yet I do want to make one point: that this particular form of psychoanalysis was too rigid to respond to the cultural transformations taking place...

...In addition to these practical factors, there are larger cultural forces working against analysis...

...To be sure, after the New York Review of Books published an article by Frederick Crews—the Kenneth Starr of Freud criticism—praising a number of second-rate books that were highly critical of Freud, the analytic camp sent off a barrage of letters...

...Until recently, the treatment of homosexuals within the American Psychoanalytic Association was a grim story...

...Indeed, the "citizenry" itself must determine the rules that govern those negotiations...

...as patients, their sexual orientation was pathologized...

...For it touched on many of the central issues confronting our public life...

...It has been carried forward by all the emancipatory struggles of modernity: the workers', civil rights, student, women's, and gay and lesbian movements, and the anticommunist movements in the Soviet bloc— as well as by the aesthetic avant-garde...

...Indeed, the creation of psychotropic drugs—which undeniably have their place in the immediate reduction of pain—marks a major step forward in the conquest of human nature...

...By accepting these criteria, analysts give up "the project of autonomy" and move over to "the project of mastery...

...Correctly or incorrectly, this is what Freud did...

...The very fact that the analysts had such difficulty defending themselves could be seen as symptomatic of the crisis of the profession...

...The opposition launched its attack on July 31, 1995 in the form of a letter to officials of the Library, which expressed the seemingly reasonable concern that the exhibition "should suitably portray the present status of knowledge and adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to intellectual history...

...Indeed, the article was such a relief that copies of it were distributed at the fall meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association...

...Are our cultural institutions becoming too timid in the face of repeated attacks (often coming from the right...

...It also raises questions concerning the tenuousness of human solidarity and the fact of human destructiveness...

...Largely as a result of the feminist challenge, female psychology has become a wideopen and hotly debated topic even within mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis...

...It highlighted traditional questions about free speech and prior restraint that were PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY addressed in articles by Anthony Lewis, Todd Gitlin, and Paul Goldberger: Is a show funded by federal money obliged to present all points of view...

...The exhibition was possible now because of an arrangement that allowed access to many documents that had formerly been sealed...

...And although these approaches perhaps appear more humane, they too are fraught with theoretical difficulties...

...Because of this, "psychoanalysis is crucial for a truly democratic culture to thrive...

...As W. H. Auden noted in his oftenquoted memorial to Freud, the "creatures" of the night can "serve enlightenment" too...

...By the fifties and sixties, with the medicalization and normalization of the profession in this country, the prestige of the profession was at its height...

...Unlike other species, whose natures are rigidly determined by their instinctual wiring, humans are, to a significant degree, defined by their representations of themselves...

...The result was that "capitalism, liberalism, and the classical revolutionary movement" all came to share the belief that technical mastery alone held the key to human emancipation and well being...

...And it was taking place at a time when major cultural institutions were being hit by budget cuts...

...With it, developmental theory could be turned into an instrument of conventional morality...

...For years, homosexuals' sexual preferences were seen as a problem to be cured...

...And one of the original letter signers—Morris Eagle, then president of the largest organization of psychologistpsychoanalysts in the country—was added to the advisory committee...

...Castoriadis attributes the rise of MarxismLeninism to the fact that the workers movement didn't sufficiently understand itself in terms of autonomy and democracy, but bought into "the project of mastery...

...The critics rejected as tokenism an invitation to participate on a panel or to present their views in a video presentation as part of the show...

...By demonstrating the existence of infantile sexuality, the depth of unconscious mental processes, and the pervasiveness of bisexuality, Freud destroyed the consoling myths that DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 61 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY children are innocent, that humans are essentially rational animals, and that sexual identity is an unambiguous matter...

...If our core self-representations are radically transformed, it is not going too far to say that what we are is altered at the same time...

...In other clinical approaches, therapists have preconceived ideas of psychic health that they try to realize in their patients through their expertise...

...Due to his unique synthesis of Enlightenment and Romantic thinking, Freud suggests a way, in Lear's words, to "take irrationality seriously and participate in the democratic ideal...

...As honest smallholders on this earth," as Freud put it, women and men must autonomously determine the fundamental principles for ordering their lives without any theological or metaphysical supports...

...At that point, "the sober, well-prepared ones" took over, the ones "who are hard-working enough to wish to better their professional efficiency...

...Theoretically, psychoanalysis belongs to the "project of autonomy" because of the immense expansion of the topics it "put into question...

...Does a militant and well-organized group have the right to block an exhibit because they think its views are pernicious...

...the patient is basically the passive recipient of the therapist's ministrations...

...As Jonathan Lear put it, "Freud is just a stalking horse . . . . The real object of attack . . . is the very idea that humans have unconscious motivation...

...The points they made were, for the most part, only passable...

...JOEL WHITEBOOK is a practicing analyst...

...Castoriadis notes that like Plato, Freud's achievement has been to pursue the meaning of human existence in a methodically radical way, even when it affronts our collective self-esteem...

...However, his theory of psychosexual development, which culminates in what is called a (heterosexual) genital phase, could be used to justify a "normalizing" approach...

...Contrary to recent criticisms of classical analysis as "oneperson psychology," the pursuit of this aim requires the activity of both partners working together to maximize one partner's autonomy and DISSENT / Spring 1999.63 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY activity, rather than the therapist's ministrations to a passive patient...

...This is partly the result of Freud's hostility towards philosophy...

...One could even argue that contemporary feminism is partly a result of that process...

...If it is to attract the best minds of the new generations, psychoanalysis must clearly line up with the emancipatory movements of modernity rather than with "the immemorial figures of the Father and the Judge, of Family and Law, in the order of Order, of Authority and Punishment," to use Derrida's apt phrase...

...Castoriadis and Lear, however, stress the latter as a way to bring out the connection between democracy and the renunciation of omnipotence...

...The mental health bureaucracies are not, however, interested in autonomy but in efficiency and the bottom line...

...Psychoanalytic conservatives have usually used the book's myth of the primal horde to argue for the necessity of an authoritarian social order and the futility of revolt...

...In any case, there is little disagreement that Conflict and Culture is occurring at a time when the profession of psychoanalysis is suffering from a deep crisis, especially in the United States, not only in the eyes of the general public, but in the perceptions of the analysts themselves...

...Everyone envied the successes of the natural sciences...

...And what is that meaning...

...The aim of psychoanalysis, in contrast, is to maximize the patient's potential for autonomy...

...Robert Olds, a New York analyst, likened Freud's situation to that of a physician who had to perform the first appendectomy on himself, using a mirror and without anesthesia...

...Indeed, Fred Pine, a well-respected veteran of the analytic scene, believes there hasn't been so much serious debate about fundamental issues since the 1920s...

...Such an exhibit hadn't been feasible before because many of the papers could not be used owing to legal restrictions concerning patient-doctor confidentiality...

...The Freud wars are perhaps even more directly a fight about human nature...

...But three of them did finally contribute to the volume that was published in conjunction with the show...

...Although Freud's writings on methodology are complicated and maybe even contradictory—combining both interpretive and positivist tendencies—American analysts, for the most part, jumped on the bandwagon and accepted only the positivist strand, attempting to defend analysis as a strict science...

...One of the best things to come out of the whole episode was the emergence of Jonathan Lear, a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, as a highly effective spokesperson for the psychoanalytic position...

...The introduction of faxes, email, cellular phones, and CNN have sped things up to the point where we live in a world where everything is experienced as happening simultaneously...

...The petitioners argued that the exhibition, as it was constituted, did not give the whole range of opinion about the Freudian project and therefore could be seen as an attempt to silence the opposition...

...However, the transplantation of psychoanalysis from Europe to the United States caused the mutation of a new subspecies of Homo psychoanalyticus...

...Not since King Tut came to New York's Metropolitan Museum in the early seventies has an exhibition caused so much commotion...

...In doing this, he also changed what we are in some important sense...

...None of them seemed up to stopping the momentum of the anti-Freudians...

...In June 1994, the Library of Congress, which has the largest collection of Freud manuscripts in the world, announced it was planning a major exhibition on Freud in May 1996...

...He is the author of Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory and is completing a book on Freud and Foucault...

...Besides sensationalistic journalism, the postponement of the exhibit also generated some serious discussion...

...The current crisis is, in no small part, a result of that failure...