Abstract
As an aperitif to Freud’s historic visit to Clark University in 1909, his American disciple A. A. Brill took him on a whirlwind tour of New York City. Among the sites they visited was Coney Island, which, according to Jones (1955, p. 56), Freud found fascinating. He described it as “a magnified Prater” (referring, of course, to the celebrated amusement park in Vienna).
Little else is known of his reaction to that visit; no reference to it appears in his published writings or in his known letters. But to a small group of Coney Island’s mostly Jewish intellectuals that incident was never forgotten. In 1926, led by an artist and designer named Albert Grass, they founded the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Drawing from the archives of the society, which she recently discovered, the artist Zoe Beloff (the editor of this intriguing book) writes that the group met monthly in an office on Surf Avenue, where they held lectures and discussions and, most important, screenings of filmed re-creations of their dreams, guided by their readings from “dog-eared copies of The Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud 1900; Beloff incorrectly gives the date as 1913, apparently using the publication date of Brill’s translation). “It appears,” she writes, “that the members of the . . . Society were self-taught Freudians . . . working-class men and women . . . who wanted to take part in the great intellectual adventures of the city. . . . One can think of them as working-class Utopians” (p. 61).
The book, richly illustrated by photographs of the old Coney Island and colorful reproductions of some of the artwork created by Grass and other members of the group, is a provocative blend of fact and fancy. The fancy is provided by one Norman Klein, who opens the volume with a long, spun-out tale of Freud’s putative experience, based on supposed notes found in a collection of Freudian ephemera unearthed, he says, in 1999. Klein has Freud wandering alone about the park, nosing into every exhibit (“There is reason to believe that . . .”; “We are also reasonably certain that . . .”), encountering seductive women, and requiring that every communication be translated into German (evincing Klein’s ignorance of Freud’s fluent command of English).
Klein wanders further into fantasy in creating a highly implausible relationship between Freud and the Russian Jewish artist El Lissitsky in 1928. There is no evidence, either in Jones’s biography of Freud or in Sophie Lissitsky-Kuppers’s biography of her husband (1967), of any encounter, let alone close connection, between the two, but Klein elaborates a protracted collaboration eventuating in Lissitsky’s well-known “Proun” series (an acronym for the Russian “Project for the Affirmation of the New”). (The project was of course initiated well before 1928, by which time Stalin had suppressed modernist movements, and Freud would in any case have been completely out of sympathy with Lissitsky’s abstract Constructivist aesthetic.)
The problem here is not with Klein’s fictionalizing of Freud’s Coney Island experience and its aftermath (a fictional Freud has appeared in movies and on the stage), but with the book’s failure to identify it as such and, indeed, the occasional references to his tale by other contributors (including the book’s editor) as though it were grounded in fact. Fortunately, Beloff’s account of the origins and evolution of the Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and her description of several of the homemade films concocted by members of the group from its origins to its demise in 1970 have the ring of truth.
Notably, the book is accompanied by a DVD that shows nine of the brief films produced by members of the society over the years of its existence, starting with Albert Grass’s 1926 The Magic Crane, in which he demonstrates both his cinematic skills and his grasp of Freud’s view of the dream as the fulfillment of an infantile wish. Technically, the film achieves a higher level than any of those that follow, all of which are clearly home-movie productions that seize on one or another Freudian idea as the amateur filmmaker understands it. Among them, Charmion de Forde’s The Praying Mantis (1931) deals most explicitly with sexuality, concluding with a then-daring display of lesbian nudity. The most successful of the later films is The Lion Dream, created in 1947 by one Teddy Weisengrund, a German refugee who was, Beloff notes, the only member of the group to become a practicing psychoanalyst.
The film scholar Amy Herzog concludes the book with a thoughtful, psychoanalytically informed consideration of “some of the points of connection and dissonance between Freud’s theories and the amusements offered for consumption at Coney Island’s various attractions. Of particular interest will be the spectacles of domesticity, and of domestic trauma, that have continually resurfaced throughout Coney Island’s history” (p. 106). She points out that, in the graphic and sanguinary representations of domestic violence that pervaded such exhibits as those in the Wax Museum that opened in 1926 (richly illustrated in the book), Coney Island came closer to Jean-Martin Charcot’s theatrical displays of “Grande Hysterie” at the Salpêtrière than to illustrations of Freud’s concepts of the role of primal scene trauma in the genesis of neurosis.
Overall, this book is attractively produced, richly entertaining, and informative of a little-known episode in the dissemination of psychoanalysis into the popular culture of the early twentieth century. The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society was, as Beloff notes, the only such organization known to have existed in the United States, but it epitomized the influence that Freud and his ideas exerted on what Dwight MacDonald called the “middlebrow” idiom of the years that followed the Clark University lectures. But, as Freud is said to have said to Jung on that occasion, “They don’t know that we are bringing them the plague.”