mlTH KURZWEIL
A Politically Correct Freud?
There is a sure-fire way these days for anyone to make a splash: 1) find a
weak target and proclaim it a pillar of the establishment; 2) get a number
of its foes and your friends to rally behind you; 3) with luck you may get
them to sign a petition; 4) then go to your contacts in the press. This
practice has become part of our
z eitgeist.
The attacks are justified in the name of free speech, of furthering de–
bate versus silence. But because the ensuing controversies take place in
disparate domains of inquiry, and in substance are internal to specific
fields, participants tend to overlook the fact that their disputes are part of
a larger phenomenon, of the general atmosphere criticizing the idea of
tradition, the accumulation of knowledge, the possibility of arriving at
truth. To call these incidents "politically correct" has become cliched. For
the naming itself avoids analysis and no longer fully applies. Psychoana–
lysts, for instance, are perceived as traditionalists. Their opponents dismiss
them as part of the establishment. The same happens to literary critics or
historians who don't buy in, who don't share these preferences. Nor do
they hold on to the 1960s radicalism that decreed that "the personal is the
political," and who assumed that every scientific enterprise was to further
human and political advances. In other words, individuals who have
given up on revolutionary politics are hoping to make their dreams come
true in the realm of culture - with the help of the press, and the law.
The current brouhaha surrounding the "temporarily" canceled Freud
exhibit at the Library of Congress is only the most recent example of our
current propensity to put down traditional knowledge. It was instigated
by two Freud scholars renowned for their antagonism to psychoanalysts -
by Peter Swales, who a number of years ago gained attention when
claiming that Freud had had an illicit affair with his sister-in-law Minna
Bernays, and by Frederick Crews, a professor of English whose articles in
The New York Review oj Books
against psychoanalytic practice have at–
tracted attention.
According to Crews, "the show was conceived as a means of mobi–
lizing support for the besieged practice of psychoanalysis .. . and [the
protesters asked] only for recognition that independent contemporary
scholarship offers a radically different view of Freud from the one pro–
moted by the psychoanalytic establishment." Not so. Only two of the
eleven exhibition consultants belong to the so-called American establish-
