http://chronicle.com/article/Freuds-Visit-to-Clark-U/48424/
September 21, 2009
When Freud Came to America
By Russell Jacoby
One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud arrived in the United States on his
first and only visit. As the George Washington pulled into New York
Harbor, he supposedly remarked to Carl Jung, who accompanied him, "They
don't realize that we are bringing them the plague." His more vociferous
contemporary critics would probably agree.
Freud came to deliver five lectures over five days in September 1909 at
Clark University. Its president, G. Stanley Hall, had invited a number
of leading thinkers to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Clark. Clark?
For our rank-obsessed society, that might seem surprising. Not Chicago
or Princeton or Columbia but a small Massachusetts university with just
16 faculty members had invited one of the pivotal thinkers of the 20th
century. Indeed, William James came over from Harvard to listen to the
lectures. Perhaps we overlook the role of the smaller and less flashy
schools in American cultural life. Twenty-four years later a small
outfit on West 12th Street in Manhattan hired many more refugees from
Nazism than more celebrated institutions. In its housing of exiled
scholars, the New School far eclipsed grander universities.
Perhaps the balance of wealth in the early part of the century was not
as skewed as it is nowadays; or at least Hall's invitation to Freud
opens a small window into a neglected question of the economics of
writing and lecturing. Hall first offered Freud an "honorarium" of $400
to cover expenses to lecture in July. Freud declined because he would
lose too much income by canceling three weeks of private consultations.
Hall upped the honorarium to $750, and the lectures were shifted to
September, when Freud had no appointments.
An honorarium of $750 is roughly in the league of what might be paid a
professor nowadays to fly across the country and give a lecture, if he
or she is lucky. Of course a 1909 greenback is not a 2009 greenback.
Various indexes exist to update past prices. Readjusted in current
dollars, $750 in 1909 computes out to something between $18,000 and
$36,000 in 2009—not a bad piece of change! Few writers or professors
would turn down an offer nowadays to give some lectures if the
invitation came with a $20,000 honorarium. The amount not only suggests
the relative wealth of Clark—Hall had $10,000, or half a million in
current dollars, to spend on the anniversary—but the generous
remuneration for independent lectures in the early part of the 20th century.
Freud spoke off the cuff from notes to a good crowd. Yet contemporary
observers of the Clark lectures did not mention what today would be
extraordinary. Freud spoke in German with no translation provided. Today
if Jürgen Habermas lectured in German at an American university, the
audience could comfortably sit around a small table. But a century ago,
a series of lectures in German neither diminished the audience nor
elicited disapproval. In 1909 advanced study usually meant study in
Germany. It was assumed the professoriate knew German. Today the
opposite is true. That might not be a reason for dismay, if other
languages have replaced German, but that has not happened. The din about
globalization evades the reality of the decline of serious language
study among American students. Globalization spells "English Spoken Here."
Freud suspected that American prudishness would curtail the reception of
his ideas. I think, he wrote to Jung before they departed, that once the
Americans "discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they
will drop us." Later critics of Freud, especially feminist critics,
forget to what extent he showed up as a militant sexual reformer. He
wanted to be able to talk about sexual desire and liberalize sexual
practices. He made no effort to mute that message. Freud's five lectures
closed with a call to allow greater sexual freedom. He said civilization
demands "excessive" sexual repression. "We ought not to aim so high that
we completely neglect the original animality of our nature." He
cautioned that it was not possible to "sublimate" all sexual impulses
into cultural accomplishments.
To drive his point home, Freud closed with an analogy and recounted a
folk tale about the foolish residents of Schilda. They owned a strong
and productive horse with one flaw, its need for expensive oats. The
thrifty citizens decided to gradually cut down its ration until the
horse grew accustomed to "complete abstinence." The plan of action went
well until one day the townspeople woke up and found the horse had died.
This perplexed them. Freud closed his last lecture and formal visit to
the United States with the following sentence: "We are inclined to
believe that the horse had died of starvation and that without a certain
ration of oats, no work can indeed be expected from an animal."
In the first rows of the audience sat Emma Goldman, the anarchist and
sexual reformer, with her lover Ben Reitman. She was "deeply impressed"
by Freud's "lucidity" and "the simplicity of his delivery." (She did not
comment that he lectured in German.) She also attended the ceremony
where Freud received an honorary degree. The other professors appeared
"stiff and important in their university caps and gowns," but Freud
looked "unassuming" in his ordinary attire. She called him a "giant
among pygmies."
If he needed it, a reference from Emma Goldman could burnish Freud's
credentials as a sexual reformer. Yet an opening and incidental sentence
to his five lectures may prove more prescient than his last: "I have
discovered with satisfaction that the majority of my audience are not of
the medical profession." The observation seems trivial, but much turned
on it. With virtually no success in the United States, Freud fought what
might be called the monopolization of psychoanalysis by medical doctors.
He wanted nonmedical or lay people to practice psychoanalysis, if they
were properly trained. This was no minor issue to Freud. He distrusted
the medical profession. He feared that doctors would turn psychoanalysis
into a subfield, a narrow therapy. I do not "consider it at all
desirable for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medicine," he wrote,
"and to find its last resting place in a textbook of psychiatry under
the heading, 'Methods of Treatment.'"
In fact, that more or less happened. American doctors banished lay
practition-ers and made psychoanalysis into a medical speciality. For
decades psychoanalysis prospered as psychiatrists embraced it, but more
recently the doctors have moved on. Psychoanalysis was too slow, too
expensive, too uncertain, and too unscientific. Along with academic
psychologists, psychiatrists adopted chemical, behavioral, and
pharmaceutical approaches.
But Freud did not defend psychoanalysis on the basis of its therapeutic
effectiveness; he had other, perhaps more imperial ambitions.
("Somewhere in my soul," he admitted, "I am a fanatical Jew.") He wanted
psychoanalysis to contribute to literature and culture, even reform
society. He invoked the possibility of "combating the neuroses of
civilization." He wrote smaller and smaller books on bigger and bigger
subjects, such as The Future of an Illusion (on religion) and
Civilization and Its Discontents (on happiness and aggression).
This may be the "plague" that Freud brought to the New World:
uninhibited thinking. To be sure, the molecular, genetic, or chemical
perspective may be perfectly suitable for treating many ailments or
behaviors. Yet the clamorous effort to rid the world of Freud is
misguided. Psychology departments may relegate psychoanalysis to
phrenology and other quackeries as they seek testable results, but
Freud's thought lives on in the humanities—or wherever scholars and
students contemplate the vagaries of desire, morality, and religion. In
the name of reason, Freud challenged the veneer of reason. He dug to
uncover the forces that make us not only loving but also odd, hateful,
and violent. Even when he was wrong, a boldness infused his thinking. He
remains a tonic for a cautious age. The epigram that Freud chose for The
Interpretation of Dreams—a line from Virgil—has not lost its appeal: "If
I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up hell."
Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at
the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The
Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect:
Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).
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