ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Few figures have had as decisive and fundamental an
influence on the course of modern cultural history as Sigmund Freud. Yet
few figures also have inspired such sustained controversy and intense
debate. Freud's legacy continues to be hotly contested, as demonstrated
by the controversy attracted by this exhibition even before its opening.
Our notions of identity, memory, childhood, sexuality, and, most
generally, of meaning have been shaped in relation to - and often in
opposition to - Freud's work. This exhibition examines Freud's life and
his key ideas and their effect upon the twentieth century.
Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture is
composed of three major sections.
Section One: Formative
Years
The Formative Years section begins in late
nineteenth-century Vienna, the milieu of Freud's early professional
development. The cultural ferment, ethnic tensions, and class conflicts
of fin-de-siecle Vienna were part of Freud's daily existence. The city
was a hothouse for radical innovations in politics, philosophy, the
arts, and sciences. Freud chose early to concentrate on research in
neurology, a field in which the frontiers of knowledge were changing
dramatically. Financial concerns eventually led him to pursue clinical
work with patients. His analyses of patients and of himself became the
chief sources for his professional writings.
Section Two: The
Individual: Therapy and Theory
This section examines key psychoanalytic concepts and
how Freud used them in some of his most famous cases. Like many doctors,
writers, and philosophers working at the end of the nineteenth century,
Freud grew increasingly interested in the unconscious. He took the
unconscious to be a dimension of human life at once inaccessible and
important as a source of thoughts and actions. In his efforts to
decipher the meanings of hysterical symptoms and other neglected mental
phenomena that seemed beyond conscious control (such as dreams and slips
of the tongue), Freud moved further away from his neurological training.
Committed to the idea that apparently meaningless behaviors actually
expressed unconscious conflict, he developed techniques for determining
what the behaviors might mean. This section-divided into six
parts-introduces us to some of Freud's most famous patients and the key
concepts with which he tried to make sense of their symptoms and their
lives.
Section Three: From the
Individual to Society
The third section explores the diffusion of
psychoanalytic ideas, and Freud's speculations about the origins of
society and the social functions of religion and art, and how crises
reveal fundamental aspects of human nature. As Freud expanded his sphere
of inquiry to include basic questions about moral and political life, he
inspired intellectuals and artists to take his theories about conflict,
desire, and the unconscious into new areas. These theories seemed to
many to open promising new avenues for understanding the successes and
failures of modern society. Others thought that these routes led
straight to deception - or worse. The first part of this section deals
with the professional expansion of psychoanalysis and the critical
reaction to that expansion. Next the exhibition examines Freud's
theories of society, from his speculation on its origins to his views of
the contemporary world. The violent crises that shook the world at the
end of Freud's life are the subject of the final part of this section.
Throughout the exhibition, words and images - often
contentious, sometimes humorous -attest to the impact of Freud's ideas
on the twentieth century. Freud's thinking emerged in the wake of Marx
and Darwin, both of whom emphasized struggle as the engine of change.
Freud's thought developed in a century in which violent conflicts
reached unheard of dimensions. The conflicts that Freud stressed were
within the psyche: people at war with themselves and sometimes with the
cultural authorities they had internalized. But he thought that the way
we managed (or failed to manage) those conflicts had everything to do
with the explosions of violence that marked the modern world. Although
much has changed since Freud first formulated his theories, today's
concern with the disruptive power of sexuality and aggression has only
intensified. Freud did not propose solutions to how one might escape
this violence. Instead, his writings on the connection of culture and
conflict identified fundamental problems for the twentieth century -
problems that show no sign of disappearing as we move into the
twenty-first.
The Exhibition
SIGMUND FREUD: CONFLICT AND CULTURE
at Beth Hatefutsoth was made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship
of the following:
HELMUT ZILK-FONDS FR
INTERNATIONALE BEZIEHUNGEN WIENS
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs -
Cultural & Scientific Agreements Division
Yehoshua Rabinovich Fund for the Arts - Tel Aviv
R. Steindling
 |
GESELLSCHAFT DER FREUNDE
DER UNIVERSITִT TEL AVIV
IN ײSTERREICH |
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