Knowledge, power, and Freud's Clark conference lectures

Abstract

In 1909, Sigmund Freud delivered five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University. This rhetorical event, Freud's only public appearance in the United States, offers a case in point of the intersection among knowledge, power, and discourse. Freud's rhetorical action constituted the “new” knowledge of psychoanalysis, while simultaneously forging relationships between the scientific and medical communities that endowed the psychoanalyst with power.