Some Background on the Meiji Restoration

In class, we briefly went over the period in Japan known as the Meiji Restoration, which provides the backdrop and context for Enchi's The Waiting Years. Here's an article with some more background on this era, a time of rapid social, political and economic change. It provides some good framework for what kind of environment Tomo and her family were living in during the story.

Freud & Religion

Our reading for Monday talks a lot about Freud's view of religion, and I was surprised to see just how strongly of an athiest he really was. This article discusses and analyzes Freud's strong opposition to religion.

One of the major points that was brought up in many of the websites I visited about this talk about how Freud believed that religion is a result of, like many of the other things he believes, childhood experiences. He stated:

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis." (Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927)

While analyzing Freud's analyzations of people, I always find it interesting to analyze Freud himself. If he truly did believe all this, then I wonder if, according to him, Freud's reason for being an atheist himself comes from his own childhood traumas and the fact that he was Jewish and being punished for it during the twentieth century. Could the fact that he was kicked out of his homeland simply because of what he "believed in" at the time be why he so strongly opposed religion when he grew up? Did he believe in religion when he was younger? Could he just be so angry at religion itself for ruining his childhood, that he completely turns against it when he grows older? Either way, his interpretations are very interesting to read...

Here is part of an article I found on Fumiko Enchi online. It gives a brief biography. After we read Freud's Five Lectures and went into "Macbeth" we talked about the different ways we could analyze literary texts through a Freudian perspective. We talked about sublimation and the author's biography having to be psychoanalyzed before understanding the text. This talks about Enchi's relationship with her family and her battle with diseases so it may be helpful:

he following biographical sketch is adapted with deletions and additions from Sachiko S. Schierbeck, Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century: 104 biographies, 1900-1993. Copenhagen: Museum Tusalanum Press, 1994, pp. 112-118.

ENCHI FUMIKO (1905-1986) was born in Tokyo on October 2, 1905 and died of heart failure on November 14,1986. Her father was Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937), a distinguished Japanese linguist. Her grandmother (of male-lineage) was an avid partisan of Kabuki and a good story-teller. Enchi attended the girls' middle school of Japan Women's University from 1918-1922; she received private tuition in English, French. and Kambun (Chinese literature) until her marriage. She also attended the lectures of Osanai Kaoru. the founder of modern Japanese drama. In 1930, she married Enchi Yoshimatsu. a journalist with whom she had a daughter. She had two major operations, a mastectomy in 1938 and a hysterectomy in 1946.

As a young child Enchi was taken to the Kabuki theatre and listened to the gesaku novels of the late Edo era. A precocious girl, she read everything from the Genji monogatari to Edo gesaku and modern novels in adult magazines. At 13 her reading list included the works of Oscar Wilde, Edgar A1lan Poe, Hoffman. and the writings of lzumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Nagai Kafu (1879-1959). Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1868-1965), whose sado-masochistic aestheticism particularly fascinated her. Her interest in the theatre was encouraged also by her father. In 1926 her one-act play. "Furusato" (A Birthplace), was published in the journal Kabuki and was received favorably. Another one-act play "Banshu soya" (A Noisy Night in Late Spring, 1928) was acclaimed when it was staged at the Tsukiji Little Theatre. After the birth of her daughter, Enchi turned to novel writing. Her earliest novels such as Kaze no gotoki kotoba (The Words Like the Wind, 1939), Ten no sachi, umi no sachi (The Treasures of Heaven and Sea. 1940) and Shunju (Spring and Autumn, 1943) did not sell well.

During the war Enchi lost property in the bombing and afterwards she made a slow recovery from a cancer operation. In this period. she published little. Around 1951 she reestablished herself as an author writing of the suffering of women. In 1953 the title story of Himojii tsukihi (Starving Days), which had first appeared in serial form in 1951, won the Women's Literature Prize. It is a violent, harrowing tale of family misfortune and deprivation. both physical and emotional. The highly praised novel, Onna zaka (The Waiting Years, 1949-1957) won the Noma Literary Prize. It analyzed the plight of women who had no alternative but to accept the demeaning roles that the patriarchal family system had assigned to them. At the age of 15 the protagonist Tomo is married to a government official. When he becomes an influential man, he begins to have affairs, and persuades the childless Tomo to let him have a young mistress living in their house. Many of Enchi's most memorable characters are mature women who have either lost their reproductive function, or their beuaty, or both and as a result seethe with anger, passion and even erotic desire. With the qualities that society values most in a woman, her sexuality and her capacity to reproduce, absent, she has little on which to base claims of authority or legitimacy. Tomo's husband does not stop the humilation of his wife by placing just one mistress in his household, he adds another. He even stoops to seducing his own daughter-in-law, his brutish son's wife, much to the horror of Tomo and the other two concubines. However, Tomo maintains her position as the mistress of the household, even showing these defenceless young women compassion. On her deathbed, Tomo insists that she does not want her body to be buried; it should simply be dumped into the water. Her husband shudders as he listens to her, realizing at last the torments she has suffered for forty years. The text ends with these two sentences:

His body had suffered the full force of the emotions that his wife had struggled to repress for forty years. The shock was enough to split his arrogant ego in two.

With these words, powerful blow was delivered against the patriarchy and its abuses. Anger and resentment long suppressed surfaces with such force that it can shatter a husband's ego. As Nina Cornyetz notes in her study Dangerous Women, Deadly Words

Known as a writer of pyschological fiction, Enchi's narrative project more accurately combined a fiction or archetypes with vacillations between "gestalt" interiority ad "individual" interiority. . .For Enchi, "psychological interiority," as written in a text, was both deeply individual and personal but nonetheless inseparable from the collective, sociolpolitical experience of being a woman in modern Japan" (101).

In other words, while Enchi clearly does probe the interior psychological spaces of her female characters, she is also interested in placing them squarely in the current of Japanese history and society. The Waiting Years, in particular, is centered on the period in which the prewar patriarchal political and social order was constructed, i.e., between the 1880s and the 1920s.

Freud and Free Mental Health Clinics

Not sure if you'll be able to access this without being a subscriber to the Chronicle, but give it a try, if you're interested in Freud and social justice:

Freud's Free Clinics

Did Freud Fall Short as a Therapist?

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times that questions whether Freud was actually effective at all in treating his patients. It mentions some outrageous things that Freud did, such as convincing two men in different marriages to divorce and marry the opposite spouse. This was based on Freud's idea that one of the men was a "latent homosexual". In addition, he tried to convince this man to donate money to him during a session.

As the article states:
''Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man,'' wrote Freud, who was in the process of engineering the marriage. ''If matters turn out all right, let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.''

I found this completely outrageous; what kind of therapist would manipulate his patient into donating money to him? The article then mentions a few of his specific patients, including Anna O. and Dora. According to some of Dora's cousins, she didn't seem to have much wrong with her. Worse, she apparently gained a bad reputation for visiting Freud in the first place.

According to the article:
"When the woman had actually met Ida, she saw nothing that supported the idea she was a 'repulsive hysteric.' But she had a bad reputation, apparently based on the stigma of her having gone to see Freud.''

I know Freud was wrong about a lot of things, and that he was a product of his era, but some things he did still strike me as crossing a boundary. Convincing two men to break up their marriages just seems cruel and unusual, in any circumstance. Did Freud realize the power he had to influence people, the trust and faith that people had in him by going to him? Sometimes, it doesn't seem that way.

The full article can be found here.

The Nineteenth-Century Hysteric

Here's just one example of somatic treatment of hysteria in the nineteenth century.

Vibrators were used to resolve hysterical fits.

Water treatments were also common.

Just a thought...

The first book I ever read in its entirety by Freud was Civilization and its Discontents. He makes his first wayward assumption when he talks about the basic instinct for man to urinate on fire, and those who could 'tame the fire inside' were the first to be able to found and form a society. A little artistic, perhaps.

What really got me was his constant references to Goethe's Faust. Why don't we read a few excerpts from a translation of it? Louis MacNeice's version does some great work with keeping the rhyme scheme and speed, even if he did take some ghastly liberties to omit.

Just a thought...

First link to come up when searching Dora. Why? I don't know

So I decided to do some research of my own on Dora. I first went to Google…of course. I searched the key words “Dora” and “Sigmund Freud” and was pretty surprised at what came up. The very first item was an article criticizing Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s dreams. http://home.swipnet.se/~w-73784/dora.htm

He then continues to say that he knows how it would have been possible to succeed where Freud failed. “To make sense of dream images one must avoid Freud's technique of projecting 'latent content' into the dream images. Instead one must keep to the images. What you see is what you get. One must investigate the image context with the aid of the patient. In the following I propose an alternative understanding of the dreams, although my interpretations will be somewhat sketchy.” You should take a look at the article to read his interpretations. The angle he takes are kind of interesting. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I’m going to wait to make my own interpretations until I read that section of the book.

The author of the article isn’t any prominent person in the academic world. I don’t even know if he has a PHD or any type of psychology degree. When I tried to find out, the home page where this article came from was in German…I think (you German speaking students are welcome to take a go). Either way, it mostly caught my attention because it made me wonder the way in which I would interpret Dora’s dreams. I also thought it related to the previous dream interpretation discussion that Emily started in the blog 2 or 3 weeks ago. I would be very interested in hearing how you all would attempt to analyze one of Dora’s dreams. Or maybe you completely agree with Freud?? Spill it!

Clarkies Dressing Up Freud ...

or are they dressing up themselves? Curiously ambiguous video from the Worcester newspaper.

Quotes By Freud

I'm very interested in how Freud views homosexuality and the other day when I was reading some articles on his thoughts I found some interesting quotes. These are some of my favourite:

1) I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality...I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

2) Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degredation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

3) Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

You can go look at all of them. http://www.voicingouropinions.com/2009/05/sigmund-freud-quotes/

Rejected or Not - Reconsidered

Sure, Freud began treating the patient differently--in ways that pre-supposed mental causes of physical and psychological issues. Did he begin a new trajectory for psychology and therapy? Sure! Are his methods truly used today? Not a lot. Can we seem reminiscences of them? Absolutely! Rather than wikipedia, Freud's free association method used in psychoanalysis is best described when he says, This [technique of free association] involves some psychological preparation of the patient. We must aim at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his own physical perceptions and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally sifts the thoughts that occur to him. In order that he may not be able to concentrate his attention on his self-observation [,] it is an advantage for him to lie in a restful attitude and to shut his eyes. It is necessary to insist explicitly on his renouncing all criticism of the thoughts that he perceives. We therefore tell him that the success of the psychoanalysis depends on his noticing and reporting whatever comes into his head and not being misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because it strikes him as unimportant or irrelevant or because it seems to him meaningless. He must adopt a completely impartial attitude to what occurs to him, since it is precisely his critical attitude which is responsible for his being unable, in the ordinary course of things, to achieve the desired unraveling of his dream or obsessional idea or whatever it may be. –Sigmund Freud

Free association, in it's true and original form, is not just talk therapy. In fact, free association is ONLY used in psychoanalysis today which IS DIFFERENT than psychoanalytic psychotherapy. When I found this out a few years ago I was confused. Aren't psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy the same thing? Nope! It's actually a hot debate in the field right now. Psychoanalysis is free association on the couch, with the analyst sitting behind them. This method, as freud describes above, allows for the patient to disregard the social other, and as a result disregard the criticism and judgment that usually strengthens the individuals "Censor". This allows for a better "breeding ground" for associations and those deep dark secrets we cannot admit to, but cause our psychological issues.On the flip side, psychoanalytic psychotherapy uses some freudian techniques but you are facing each other, like you would in most therapy sessions you go to now a days.

Says, "I go to therapy" is like saying "I am religious". It is extremely broad. "Are you Christian? Catholic?Muslim? Jewish? etc.?" Therapy includes a multiplicity of facets--and not all involve what is described above. For starters, there are psychologists and psychiatrists. The former you talk to, the latter you get prescriptions from. Psychiatrists have medical degrees and know about medications. Psychologists do not. Insurance is another issue. Modern insurance companies will hardly pay for a psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis you meet 4 times a week (on average) for the 50 minute hour. Psychoanalytic therapy you meet less (it varies). Other therapies will vary as well, form once a month, to once a week. Therefore, insurance covers those therapies which are quick and easy and do not take 5 years to finish (this is an exaggeration, but can be true). Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy does deep into the patients life. Other therapies will treat the surface symptom--a bandaid. The goal being to make people functional in society again.

The range of other therapies consist of cognitive-behavioral therapy, rational therapy, play/art//music therapy, logotherapy, person/client-centered therapy, and the list goes on and on. However, although they may include some sort of talking, they do not use methods such as transference/counter-transerence, analyst-analysand dynamics, oedipus complex, sexual theories, etc. that are spelled out in freudian literature. Rejected in main stream? Yes. Still alive in psychoanalytic circles? yes, but psychoanalysis today has come a long way since freud 100 years ago.

Chicken or the Egg?

I found a very interesting article on Freud's cocaine addiction...the writing seems a little biased but I was entertained by it so I figured it was worth posting!

http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine/

This article made me wonder about Freud's hysteric patients. He was treating people for hysteria, but the fact that he was a coke user and administered the drug to his patients makes me wonder if his patients were indeed victims of hysteria, or rather victims of this drug.

I visited a website (http://www.cocaine-effects.com/) on cocaine withdrawel symptoms, and I found the following:

• Paranoia
• Irritability
• Restlessness
• Auditory hallucinations
• Mood disturbances

I find it intriguing that a lot of these symtoms are also symptoms of hysteria! Is it at all possible that these patients were not hysterical in the first place, but were rather suffering from the terrible side effects of this drug that was being administered to them? It is obviously impossible to deduct which came first--the hysteria or the coke--just like the chicken or the egg--but it certainly is an interesting thought to entertain!

Rejected or Not?

I've been reading a lot of websites that talk about how Freud's theories are pretty much rejected in today's society. However, I also found on a few websites that there are almost 50,000 licensed therapists in the US. Therapy is basically the practice of having someone to talk to your feelings about...isn't this essentially what Freud was leading up to?

Freud's free association theories--explained here--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_(psychology)

have to do with talking freely about a subject. Talking about something that is bothering you, as we all have experienced, often makes you feel better. How can so many people reject Freud's theories when so many people in the US are PAYING to put his theories into action? I thought the words of one of the speakers on October 3rd summed this up nicely when he said, "to reject Freud is to reject ourselves". After all, if we are using his practices, we must have at least a little bit of faith in him!

Links to Boston Psychoanalytic Groups:

1. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

2. The Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis

3. Psychoanalytic Educational Forum of Boston

New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

NY Times on the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:

Patching Up the Frayed Couch

A NY Times article:

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department

A Psychoanalyst came to visit the workshop from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He told me about this fellowship given to an academic outside the institute and discipline of psychoanalysis. The goal is working with the institute for a year and producing a paper/presentation. This years paper/presentation is coming up and the event is as follows:

Julius Silberger Award Presentation

Wednesday November 4, 2009
08:00PM

THE FETISH GOES TO WAR:
Disavowal and the Family Romance in Modern China

ELLEN SCHATTSCHNEIDER, PhD
2008-2009 Silberger Scholar

Discussant
HUMPHREY MORRIS, MD

During Japan’s long era of overseas military adventurism (c. 1890-1945) the class of ritual figurines known as ningyo (usually translated into English as “dolls”) were often deployed as symbolic doubles of military combatants and victims of war. Ningyo were given as gifts to soldiers and kamikaze pilots, and used to memorialize those who died “in the service of the Emperor.” I provisionally characterize each of these deployments of doll figurines akin to “family romances,” fantasy tableaus of a privileged relationship between an injured person and his or her primary love object (a lover, child or sibling) frozen in time outside of the ebbs and flows of history and everyday life. Under conditions of serious injury, these ritualized scenarios allow for processes of disavowal as well for splittings of the ego. Through these practices, the agonizing repetitions of trauma are transferred or avoided, with varying degrees of success.

References:
1. Freud, Sigmund. Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence. (PEP)
2. Freud, Sigmund. (1909c [1908]). Family romances. SE, 9: 235-241.
3. Schattschneider, Ellen. “The Work of Sacrifice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Enigma of Fascist Aesthetics at Yasukuni Shrine.” The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Ed. Tansman, Alan. Duke University Press, 2009.

For a copy of Dr. Schattschneider’s article “The workshop of Sacrifice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” as background in advance of the program on November 4 please contact the BPSI Administrative Office.

Graduate Workshop " Advances in Cultural Psychology: Moving Beyond Freud"

This past wednesday, I participated in a Graduate level workshop hosted by Professor Jaan Valsiner regarding "Advances in Cultural Psychology: Moving Beyond Freud". There is no doubt that Freud wasn't right about many things, and some would say he isn't right about anything! However, we must remind ourselves that Freud was limited by the time he lived in (19th century Vienna). A product of his socio-cultural and historical period, Freud yielded a theory in which major premises were uncritically borrowed from a narrative cultural myth--oedipus--and minor premises with conceptual clarity that prevents the current standards of a "scientific psychology" from proving their existence. But in our ignorant joking, blaming, forgetting, and sometimes even hating of Freudian Psychoanalysis we fail to recognize developments in psychoanalytic theory which parallel those of modern "scientific psychology" (such as the research in 3 of the psychoanalytic societies and institutes in Boston, and more in New York). By immediately rejecting psychoanalysis, we reject the phenomena which Freud treated. Even if Freudian interpretation is incorrect, misguided, or only deserves partial merit, we fail to complement the way in which Freud treated phenomena.

The graduate workshop was about going back to Freudian Phenomena and looking at them through a slightly different lens. In order to move beyond Freud, we looked at his major premises, and attempted to construct a novel psychoanalytic theory through the alteration of said premises.

The first workshop discussion was "A Freudian Cultural Psychology". Cultural psychology is a field that involves the construction a phenomena across cultures. Professor Valsiner's cultural psychology relies heavily on semiotics--the science of signs. In this discuss, both marxist and freudian psychology were used to present a theory of constructionist repression in a consumer-fetish society. Here, repression was a "collective cultural construction" and not an individual process. Therefore, when I go to the grocery store, and see row after row of frozen chicken, I do not think of the ACTUAL chickens, nor do I think about THE PROCESS by which they are caged, slaughtered, and packaged. When I go shopping in the mall, I do not think about where each item of cloth comes from, and how it was made. As a culture, we "repress" the negative aspects in order to keep out consumer habits alive. (MAJOR PREMISE: INDIVIDUAL REPRESSION TO THE PROCESS OF REPRESSION AS A COLLECTIVE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION)

The second workshop discussion was about Obeyesekere--an anthropologist who focuses on psychoanalytic interpretation. Here we discussed the relevance of psychoanalysis in different cultures. The picking apart of Freudian theory and the attempt to validate its universality was hard. However, the tools used in the interpretation of dreams--symbols, distortions, displacements, etc.--were used quite often to explain different cultural myths, stories, and practices. These rituals and practices were not reduced to unconscious elements in a dynamic hidden psyche, but rather, displayed that certain cultural constructions are symbols to promote behaviors, and to taboo others.

A nice segue from the cultural myth was the third workshop discussion--Constructing a Psychoanalytic Theory around the Kali Myth. In this myth, psychoanalytic theory would be forced to change its application form the mother-child dyad or even the mother-father-child triad, to the husband-wife dyad. The woman in this case is also the dominant power (one that in freudian psychoanalysis, would be considered the "castrating female"--a woman without a penis but is symbolically given such through many arms and spears). Constructing a new psychoanalysis around the Kali myth was hard, but do-able with more thought.

Lastly, the fourth presentation was on "Constructing a Future-Oriented Unconscious". The unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis is on of the past--past experiences effect the present by "bubbling" up in dreams, hysterical symptoms, and everyday practices of forgetting, slips of the pen and tongue, jokes, etc. How then, can we get such past to present phenomena to orient themselves in anticipation of the future? or is it not possible?

So, overall, it was an interesting and productive workshop. But what else can we borrow from psychoanalysis? what other merits does psychoanalytic theory give us--individually, culturally, or universally?

The Local News

Channel 3 wanted to hear from yours truly about the importance of Sigmund Freud. I kind of had the feeling that the newscaster wasn't too sure that who he was. I told her that we weren't sure if we, as an institution, wanted to "celebrate" or simply "commemorate" Freud's lectures. That was already a bit too much information, I suspect!

On another front, I need some coaching for talking to the press! When the ran the clip, I heard that I said "uhmm" about ten times in one sentence. In the following story, about a gymnastics competition coming to Worcester, they interviewed a 15-year-old who didn't say "uhmm" once.

During the afternoon lecture series, Richard M. Ryan from the University of Rochester outlined his "Self Determination" theory. The part of his talk (which was also the main point) that I found the most interesting was the idea of "Intrinsic Motivation" which is the idea that an action is performed "just for the sake of doing it" as opposed to doing something because of the potential for rewards or punishments. Ryan showed the results of several experiments that showed that people are more inclined to excel in all aspects of life when their motivation is intrinsic rather than extrinsic.

One experiment that he discussed that I found particularly shocking was based on the fact that only about 40% of prescribed medication is actually taken by the people it prescribed to. Ryan found that the majority of the people who actually took their prescriptions did so because they felt it was the right thing to do, not because the doctor influenced them to do so.

I wonder what Freud would have said about this!

The West in the East

Since we're looking at Freud next week in regards to the East, I thought I'd post a clip of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, which sets Shakespeare's Macbeth in medieval Japan. Although this clip is just the trailer, it does show the Lady Macbeth character as EXTREMELY calm and calculated while she hands the Macbeth character his weapon. Also, the witch is androgynous.

Roger Bibace

Dr. Bibace is a Professor of Psychology here at Clark. A main focus of his research has been on the different relationships between the professional and the patient. Within his lecture he mentioned being psycho-analyzed and how this changed his life for the better. This may have influenced his career in Psychology.
The aspect of his lecture that most interested me was the short description of a boy he had treated. This boy was afflicted with terrible nightmares of a bear chasing him. By associating the bear with the pleasant taste of Coke Bibace was able to cure the boy of his nightmares. Though Bibace hinted that the bear may have a connection to a fear of the father (Oedipus Complex anyone?), I was interested if this was a common interpretation of the symbol bear. Though it’s probably not very credible I looked up the symbol bear on a web site called Dream Dictionary. The result was this quote “To dream that you are being pursued or attacked by a bear, denotes aggression, overwhelming obstacles and competition. You may find yourself in a threatening situation”. Bibace would probably advise against the use of this web site, for he mentioned towards the end of his lecture how both him and Freud were against any “over-arching” definition of a specific symbol.

Zoe Beloff comes to talk about the Coney Island Psychoanalytic Society

We're delighted to welcome Zoe Beloff, a New York City artist who followed up on the fact that Sigmund Freud also visited Coney Island when he came to the United States for his Clark lectures.

She will be speaking in Razzo Hall at the Traina Center at 4:15 today, Monday, October 5th.

According to Beloff, the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society emerged as a consequence of Freud's visits. The Society took the notion of Coney Island as a "Dreamland" seriously and attempted to create a psychoanalytic theme park. In addition, they filmed their dreams.

The wealthy heiress Charmion de Forde (pictured) was an early supporter of the Society, as well as an avid amateur psychoanalyst. She claimed to have been a Clark alumna, although oddly the Clark alumni office seems to have lost all records of her attendance here.

For more on the exhibit, see the New York Times review, which concludes with some intriguing questions:

Curiously, no books on the history of Coney Island mention the Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. An online search yielded only references to Ms. Beloff’s exhibit. Knowing of Ms. Beloff’s past efforts to “conjure” the past, one might wonder how much of what she presents in “Dreamland” is historical fact, and how much is wish fulfillment and projection on her part. Did the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society really exist?

“That’s a good question,” she said with a smile. “What do you think? Let’s think about interpreting this. That’s what Freud was about, taking real things and recontextualizing them to see what that says about us. Maybe that’s the approach I took.”

Mr. Beebe’s reply was equally enigmatic.

“Asking what’s real and what isn’t is the wrong question in Coney Island,” he said. “This museum explores other issues than truth and fiction.”

Sophie Freud in the Telegramm and Gazette

The T & G, Worcester's local paper, did a good story on Sophie's visit, focusing on the dynamics of the family relationships. (And slightly getting the chronology wrong.) If you click on the comments, you'll see a lively discussion about whether the Freud family was dysfunctional or not.

We also got a brief mention in the Boston Herald.

Freud, Clark and Greatnesss

The "brainiac" blog of the Boston Globe has a piece about Freud and Clark, featuring Sander Gilman, who will be coming to speak at the Global Freud symposium on November 21.

The piece seeks to answer the question: "Why would he speak at Clark?" The answer: "Because Clark is great!"

Worcester Telegram and Gazette

The Worcester Telegram and Gazette has a big article about our conference


It gives a lot of interesting information about Sophie Freud, plus her assessment of Sigmund Freud's lasting contributions: the importance of the unconscious and the significance of childhood experiences.