I have returned from a busman’s holiday – a conference in Vienna. Here are some things I learnt.
First, Vienna General Hospital, which hosted the conference, is the largest in Europe. It has a supermarket, multiple cafes and even a Starbucks. It is easy to get lost there when you’re looking for a conference room.
The hospital grounds have a statue of Sigmund Freud. Actually, there are lots of statues, because Vienna loves statues, but one of them represents Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Yes, I have a nerdy selfie with Sigmund, even though I’m not a big fan of many of his ideas.
Sigismund Schlomo Freud’s parents were Ashkenazi Jews, living in what was then part of the Austrian Empire but is now the Czech Republic. Freud completed his medical studies at the hospital in 1881, and 10 years later bought a house about 15 minutes’ walk away, where he ran his practice for the next 47 years. That house is now the Sigmund Freud Museum. Or, rather, a Sigmund Freud Museum – there’s also one in London, where he spent the last year of his life after fleeing Austria in 1938. I say fleeing, but it appears to have been a more staged retreat that has all the makings of a TV movie. The Nazis were not fans of Freud’s work, and he went through a financially extortionate process of negotiation with the Reich in order to be able to leave.
The museum has seen the house renovated, while retaining bits and pieces of the original decor. It’s an interesting mix of knick-knacks, of Freud’s writings, and a fairly full reconstruction of his waiting room. As I’ve said, I’m not a big fan of Freud’s work, but when I walked through his bedroom, his kitchen, the room (more a cupboard) where his housemaid slept, it made him human to me in a way that reading about him hadn’t.
Apparently, the house was built where a previous house had been, owned by Austrian politician and neurologist Viktor Adler. Fans of psychoanalysis will immediately make the jump I made. Is there a connection to Alfred Adler, another famous figure in talk-therapy history? The answer is no, there are just a lot of Austrian Adlers.
Alfred Adler and others, such as Carl Jung, whose names have assumed meaning in popular culture, are examples of folk who were inspired by Freud’s early insights into the importance of biology, sexuality and the unconscious for everyday functioning, but who disagreed on some specifics. Adler placed more emphasis on the role of social experience. Freud thought religion was neurotic, but Jung thought it a natural and healthy expression of our collective unconscious.
These are old-time names, but psychoanalysis continues to be a part of the talk-therapy landscape. One room in the Freud museum is devoted to an exhibit of descriptions of where psychoanalysis has gone since Freud’s time. It has recorded interviews with contemporary psychoanalysts. The one I was most struck by was that of African-American scholar and therapist Kirkland Vaughans, who has spoken on the role of inherited trauma, particularly the ongoing effects of slavery on current lives.
Freud died, in exile, of a deliberate morphine overdose, which released him from cancer that started in his jaw.
