Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society

Zoe Beloff

Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society

Zoe Beloff

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The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society is an organization founded in 1926 by Albert Grass, a man who discovered Freud’s writing while serving in the Signal Corp in France during WWI. Made up of working-class individuals who could not afford to be professional analysts, the Society was driven by the desire to participate in one of the great intellectual movements of the 20th century. The members believed that psychoanalysis would liberate their psyches from the cultural and sexual norms of the time, just as they believed that socialism would free them from oppression.

Grass encouraged members to reenact their dreams on film and analyze them when 16mm film first became available to the amateur. Every year, the Society held a competition in which members reenacted their dreams on film and analyzed them. These films provide a record of the hopes, fears, and fantasies of the changing cross-section of Coney Island’s population throughout the 20th century, from immigrant Jews and Italians to wealthy bohemians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960s.

Grass’s other great ambition was to rebuild the Dreamland Amusement park that burned down in 1911 as a true Freudian theme park. He envisioned a park that would explicate Freud’s theory of dream formation through a series of pavilions, including the Unconscious, the Dream Work Factory, the Psychic Censor, and the Consciousness pavilion, all revolving around the figure of the Libido in the form of a prepubescent girl, linked by a Train of Thought. Unfortunately, Grass failed to raise the necessary funds for this project, and he attempted a less expensive integration of Freudian theory with popular culture through a comic book called “Adventures of a Dreamer.”

The Society’s archives were first exhibited in 2009 at the Coney Island Museum to celebrate the centennial of Freud’s visit in 1909. The exhibition included drawings, paintings, photographs, films, correspondence, and architectural models, and it subsequently toured Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain.