Among last year’s worldwide celebrations of Sigmund Freud’s 150th birthday, the Austrian Embassy’s in Washington, D.C., on September 15, was special: Ambassador Eva Nowotny had gotten 30 representatives of the four largest umbrella organizations — the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, and the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work — to participate. During that long day of intense discussions, these psychoanalysts praised Freud’s original theories and put them in their context. The proceedings were published, and a year later, on November 16, 2007 — again at the Austrian Embassy — one representative of each association spoke at the presentation of “Freud at 150: 21st Century Essays on a Man of Genius.”

It was an informative evening. Much of Washington’s intelligentsia came out to listen. Freud’s ability to free-associate from philosophy to archaeology, from the past to the future, from soma to psyche, and from individual to society was endless. So it was inevitable that the invited speakers used different starting points. In my keynote address I reminded the audience that Freud had reached into and influenced every discipline; that his ideas keep dominating the lives of followers and detractors alike, and that he had attempted to clear up confusions by explaining, already in 1914, that psychoanalysis is a scientific theory, a clinical practice, and a theory of culture.