Sometimes a Birthday Cake Is Just a Birthday Cake

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The New York Sun

Analyze this: The 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth is Saturday, and celebrations are taking place here and abroad. There’s a lot of hoopla for the Viennese psychoanalyst who profoundly affected the world of ideas, film, culture, art, science, music, history, psychology, philosophy, and just about everything else with his theories of unconscious drives, repressed desires, and sexual urges. And Freudian terms such as “neurosis,” “Oedipus Complex” and the troika of “ego,” “superego,” and “id” have long since entered the vernacular.

A Jewish refugee who fled Hitler’s Europe to settle in England, Freud has become universally known for a distinctive brand of psychoanalysis, which has ramified among many disciples and followers.

Here in New York, the Museum of the City of New York, with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum, is presenting an exhibition of New Yorker magazine cartoons on psychoanalysis. At the opening last month was the director general for cultural politics at the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Emil Brix. Events at the Jewish Museum include a showing of Freud’s home movies. More events are at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Leica Gallery, and elsewhere.

Among the most unusual events takes place next Wednesday, when the New York Public Library hosts a program called “Freud’s Foreskin,” dealing with the intersection of “Jewish identity, psychoanalysis, and minor surgery.”

A co-director for the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Dr. Edward Nersessian, said, “Since Freud, the world has changed a great deal in terms of psychological ideas; not all of his assertions have stood the test of time.Yet today it’s impossible to imagine a world where on a daily basis we don’t encounter” references to, or the influence of, Freud.

Dr. Nersessian said that in psychoanalytic discourse, there is more often reference to Freud in Europe in general than in America. But, he said, he did not hear of 150th anniversary events in France while on a recent visit.

This Saturday, the center, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, will host a panel called “Psychoanalysis and Literature: 150 Years after the Birth of Freud.”

On May 21, a host of NPR’s “This American Life,” Ira Glass, and the humorist David Rakoff will discuss Freud at a sold-out event in San Francisco.

In Vienna on Saturday, the president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, will deliver the Sigmund Freud lecture, entitled “Freud and Wittgenstein: Language and Human Nature,” co-sponsored by the Sigmund Freud Foundation. His talk is part of a number of events, exhibits, and programs at libraries and museums. So large does Freud loom that Austrian President Heinz Fischer has assumed the patronage for an entire “Freud Year 2006.”

So what is it about Freud? A professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, Jeffrey Shandler, said that while Charles Darwin’s ideas and name are equally as well known as Freud’s, his face is not as iconic as Freud’s or Einstein’s. Freud, he said, is so well-known a writer and scientist that he has become an icon imprinted on T-shirts, mugs, figurines, “and even my favorite, Freudian slippers.”

Asked about the various Freud events taking place, the University Pro fessor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said institutions often want to be timely, in looking for occasions to present history exhibitions. She said this can present a “sense of urgency” – in this case a “Freud fever” – in which one feels one has to fit everything in a day or week or year.

Not all scholars are enthralled with the famed bearded refuge intellectual, who famously interpreted the dream life of patients. “I’m waiting for it to blow over,” said a longtime critic of Freudian psychology, Frederick Crews, the author of “Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays.” While Freud was a tremendously significant figure for the 20th century, Mr. Crews said, he would simply not continue to be so for our evolving understanding of the brain and the mind. He said psychological research has long abandoned the Freudian frame of reference.

Asked about Freud’s continued presence in popular culture, Mr. Crews noted that one still says “bilious,” referring to the ancient theory of the four humors. Perhaps Freudian language will be with us for centuries as well, he said.

From March through May, there has been a FreudFest taking place sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. “I’m in my bomb shelter,” Mr. Crews quipped.

***

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

Christopher Hitchens moderated a panel called “Revolution: A User’s Manual” at PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature.

At the program, the historian Jan Gross translated the remarks of the writer and former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, who told those assembled,”Karl Marx used to say revolution was the midwife of history because a midwife can decide how the birth will take place.”

Referring to Trotsky, Mr. Michnik said every revolution had two phases: a struggle for freedom followed by a struggle for power. A revolution, he said, “begins beautifully and it promises heaven.” But it always brings disappointment, he said.That’s why, he said, real success comes in an unfinished revolution. All the acts of coercion and terror that accompany a revolution are usually claimed to be justified on those grounds, he said.

Mr. Hitchens talked about Paris revolutionaries who once apparently shot at clocks to slow down time, in an effort to erect a kingdom on earth.

The author G.M. Tamas, who served in Hungary’s Parliament from 1989 through 1994, grew up in Romania. He told of an early morning visit in February 1974 when someone was hammering on his door at 4:30 a.m. Interrogators with leather trench coats and rough manners questioned him before releasing him. “Every gesture and every word” they uttered, he said, “I already knew from literature” by writers such as Arthur Koestler and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Right down to the captain asking him, “Why are you looking at me like that?” He said the least they could have done was be original, which they weren’t.

Mr. Hitchens quoted the Hungarian Marxist literary theorist Georg Lukacs who – imprisoned in Romania and not told of the charges against him – was said to have uttered the cryptic remark, “So, Kafka was a realist after all.”

One of the panelists, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, said it was time to replace the reason of force with the force of reason.

Mr. Hitchens asked panelists which was the most enduring revolution: the French, the English, or some other. He later told The New York Sun his own answer, which he hinted at but did not directly state: the American Revolution. Its singularity, he told the Sun, was its written Bill of Rights and separation of church and state.

***

TRANSLATIONS It was most interesting during the PEN Festival to learn about a Web site calledSignandsight.com, which translates German writers and intellectuals into English, making their work more accessible to the world. Also notable was a 48-page magazine offering perspectives on French fiction and non-fiction in translation that was produced by PEN American Center and the French Cultural Services, in coordination with Villa Gillet, a cultural center in Lyons.

***

PARTY LOVE Friends gathered to fete Kathy Freston’s book, “The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making it Last” (Miramax Books). Introducing her was one of the hosts, Carole Bayer Sager, who joked that with all her names she sounds like a law firm. Ms. Freston modestly praised others at the gathering, saying there was so much talent, creativity, and accomplishment in the room.”We are lifted up” by each other’s achievement and success, she said.

At the party, the Knickerbocker spoke with Renee Fleming, who said she isn’t writing a book now, but she would like to write one sometime about repertoire and technique.

***

EDGAR AWARDS The crime-fiction enthusiast and theologian Stan Lanier related this humorous anecdote from the Edgar Awards, where the jazz musician and crime novelist Bill Moody was a presenter. In presenting the Edgar Award for best paperback original, Mr. Moody recalled the night his first book was launched at a book signing in Los Angeles. Mr. Moody sat next to copies of his book but not one sold. Why? It turned out that it was the night that O.J. Simpson was taking the now-infamous drive in his white Bronco on the Los Angeles freeway.

***

ALTER-ING MOMENT The Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter spoke yesterday at Barnes and Noble about his book “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”

The book focuses on one of the “great turning points in the 20th century,” said Mr. Alter, at a recent party for the book hosted by Harry Smith, Andrea Joyce, Ken Gibbs, and Cathy Cramer, at which Frank Rich, Steve Kroft, and Caroline Kennedy, and others, were present. At the party, the Knickerbocker ran into Joe Conason, who is at work on a book to be called “It Can Happen Here,” which is a play on the title of a Sinclair Lewis novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.”

gshapiro@nysun.com


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