Freud's New York
PAUL ROAZEN
When Sigmund Freud paid his memorable trip to the United States in 1909, he spent a few days in New York City before going to Clark University for an honorary degree. A. A. Brill, then Freud's leading disciple in America, was living on Central Park West; Freud expressed his approval of the spot, strongly encouraged Brill to remain there, and from that beginning arose one of the main geographic clusters of the New York analytic community. Even in those pre-World War I days, psychoanalysis was attracting the interest of Greenwich Village intellectuals; Walter Lippmann, for example, brought Brill for an evening at one of Mabel Dodge Luhan's salons to explain the import of these new ideas. However welcome Freud's system might have been in America, he himself remained resolutely convinced that his work was in danger of being corrupted here. Freud was not content that psychoanalysis become a mere medical specialty; since he sought a triumph in the life of the mind, this continent was to him not cultured enough to be as worthy a battlefield as the Old World.
