We go to 19, Berggasse as if on a pilgrimage. Sigmund Freud lived here for almost half a century before fleeing to London in 1938, threatened by the Nazis. Here psychoanalysis was born, and the first patients were received for analysis, often members of good Viennese society who climbed a flight of steps before ringing the right doorbell, taking off their coats and waiting in the anteroom. . It is a bourgeois building, massive and sculpted, such as exists in this district north of the Ring – the circular boulevard –, then populated by doctors, civil servants and aristocrats. Transformed into a museum in 1971, renovated and expanded in 2020, Freud’s apartment receives 130,000 visitors per year, “more and more often young people”assures the director, Monika Pessler.
She thought of the place as a space of lack. This void is the one caused by totalitarianism after its passing, devastating the culture and inventiveness of a city where so many exceptional minds lived. Missing, in fact, are Freud’s couch and most of the furniture exiled with the professor and his family to Maresfield Gardens, in what became the Freud Museum in London. In Vienna, only the bench seat in the waiting room, a pedestal table and two armchairs immerse the visitor in the atmosphere of a psychologist’s office.
As in analysis, from a detail emerges a revelation, from an object a world is born: the pair of glasses to be remade, forgotten at the optician in 1938; an Art Nouveau ashtray placed on the entrance buffet; a chip on the multi-colored window which explains the absence of a hook on the wall (it must have knocked every time the window was opened). We are at the heart of the primitive scene, in the matrix of a revolutionary work. Documents, books and photographs complete the journey. The black and white films of Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s great friend, show him in the countryside. And demonstrate that, in the summer, around Vienna, the serious-looking professor also knew how to relax. The museum shop allows you to acquire pop fetishes: young Freud on a mug, Freudian beret and hat, “Neurosis” sponge…
A dream on the Bellevue lawn
Furthermore, numerous signs of the life of the inventor of the “me”, the “id” and the “superego” are scattered throughout the Austrian capital. Freud was above all a neurologist, so he has his place in the Museum of the History of Medicine. The Josephinum Academy, founded in 1785 by Joseph II, presents an incredible collection of flayed people, the dissection of the dead being then prohibited. Sensitive souls refrain, but, after all, “the self is above all corporeal”, said Freud. On the ground floor appears his portrait as well as a touching handwritten CV (“I was born in 1856 in Freiberg…”). Further on, on the Ring, in the main courtyard of the university, his bust rubs shoulders with those of the famous: the philosopher Karl Popper, the musician Anton Bruckner, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing… The Museum Jew from Dorotheergasse displays his imposing doctor’s bag (with the initials “S.F.”), which will return to Berggasse in September.
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