“Analyze This: Freud’s 1909 Visit to America through Hoboken’s Port” Lecture

September 20, 2009

A hundred years ago, one of the most important figures of the modern era passed through Hoboken on his way to a speaking engagement at Clark University. The iconic event was Sigmund Freud’s only trip to the United States, in the fall of 1909. The visit is mentioned in American history textbooks as a symbol of the great cultural changes that came in the early twentieth century. Freud began this momentous trip and ended it, also, in Hoboken.

Dr. John Burnham, Research Professor of History at Ohio State University, will visit Hoboken on Sunday, September 20, at 4 p.m., to commemorate the event 100 years after the visit ended. He will share passages from a previously untranslated document, Freud’s letter telling of his arrival in the New World. This presentation is an appropriate recognition of the role of Hoboken in this episode in American memory, an episode that symbolizes an important aspect of Hoboken’s past