c. 2000 Religion News Service
LOS ANGELES _ Tucked into a corner wall of the Skirball Cultural Center’s just-concluded exhibit on psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was a writing stand with a patron comment book, an altogether fitting appendage for an exhibit on a thinker whose entire life provoked sharp reflection and strong response.
And by the July 25 end of the four-month “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” exhibit at the Jewish museum, the writing stand had done its work, provoking some 200 pages of responses from viewers reacting to Freud’s theories on sex, dreams and psychoanalysis and the Austrian doctor’s strong grip on modern culture.
“I particularly disagree with Freud’s view on women,” one person wrote. “It’s completely distorted.”
Echoing the title of the latest Jim Carrey comedy, someone else wrote, “Me, myself and I like us here.”
Though Freud’s work has been under intense scrutiny and re-evaluation for years, one woman at the Skirball wrote: “At least I can live in a more open society because of Freud. Nowadays, there is help if people have inner conflicts or emotional pain. … Imagine how some of us would be treated 200 (even 100) years ago if we were seen as `crazy.”’
Created by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Cultures” closed here after a four-month run and about 40,000 visitors, which Skirball officials said was double their usual patron traffic.
The exhibit came to Los Angeles after a showing last year at the National Library in Austria. It spent last summer at the Jewish Museum in New York and in 1998 was at the Library of Congress for a long-postponed, controversial run. This fall the exhibit travels to a museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and next summer it will be at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
The fact that a Freud exhibit has been in cultural and not scientific museums reflects years of criticism of Freud, as his legacy keeps moving from his base in science to his broader influences in Western culture.
“Very few people were coming to learn about science. People are looking at Freud, they see him as a seminal figure of the 20th century,” said Grace Cohen Grossman, a Skirball senior curator. “In the exhibition, one could encounter the fact that scientifically there were problems with, and opposition to, his issues of gender (and) the way in which he emphasized sexuality. It was not just an homage to Freud.”
Los Angeles psychotherapist Marilyn Shenker toured the exhibit with 75 other marriage and family therapists the weekend before it closed. She said that despite Freud’s disdain for religion, he was able to look at “society and culture and himself as a Jew and how we’re influenced and a product of our culture, and the ills of society are reflected in the ills of ourselves.”
Psychotherapist Ken Unmacht said self-help movements in the 1960s and 1970s, such as EST and transcendentalism, have faded. “There are all these different philosophies and psychologies that came about in southern California,” he said. “But Freud is the only one that’s lasted from 1900 to 2000. A lot of people disagree with it and don’t like it, but it’s still present. I think the issues now are whether his theories work or not.”
The exhibit puts Freud’s Judaism into context with his stated desire to live a secular life, yet it shows how the rise of Nazism affected him deeply. Four of Freud’s sisters died at Auschwitz.
Evelyn Clark, an African-American family therapist, said Freud might empathize with the pressing mental health problems found in the black community.
“I think because of his own background as a Jew, he should be able to relate to it very realistically,” she said. Like Jews, she added, the most mentally healthy people in black communities “have to be people who are intact, in order to endure all of the inequities that they have experienced in day-to-day living.”
The traveling exhibit includes a prescription for Freud for cocaine, a wall showing decades of magazine covers, ancient home movies, personal letters and documents including his birth certificate. For U.S. audiences, there were clips from movies and TV shows reflecting the influence of Freud, ranging from “The Three Faces of Eve,” “Dear Bridget” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to “Ordinary People” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Patron comments from children and teen-agers visiting with parents or on school field trips reflected both Freud and the challenges faced by modern museums trying to reach younger audiences:
“It (the exhibit) was gay.”
“I think it was good because of the TVs.”
“`The Simpsons’ example was awesome!”
“Freud is ugly and dumb.”
“Freud is cool and crazy.”
“This guy’s a psycho!”
One adult fan said that despite criticism of his work, Freud probably would have found a home in modern Hollywood, were he alive now.
“Freud’s narcissism, where he wanted to be the most famous person in the world, would coincide with the movie industry,” the visitor wrote.
Such narcissism was reflected in the Skirball comment book, where in mid-July one man wrote, “It’s all about ME! Isn’t it?”
DEA END FINNIGAN
