Freudian footsteps in Vienna

• August 21, 2022

• August 21, 2022

  7 minute read

But it is not “the couch”. That’s in the Freud Museum in London, to where the family escaped in 1938, taking everything with them. “The famous couch will never come back,” Althoff says wistfully, although a loan may one day be possible. They’ve let art fill the void.

The item displayed in Vienna is in a permanent exhibition of conceptual art, Hidden Thoughts of a Visual Nature, in the museum that comprises several apartments on Berggasse the family inhabited over five decades. Called Liege, it was conceived by late sculptor Franz West, whose fascination with Freud led him to surmise that when the good doctor said man was a “prosthetic God”, he meant “culture is like a prosthesis”.

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But that’s the only prosthetic in the museum where, Althoff explains, “we try to concentrate on originality not recreations”. She points out a bare wall in Freud’s treatment room, with five holes showing where a rug behind the couch had been fixed. The museum had previously displayed a photo of the room here. The few original objects came via Freud’s daughter Anna, including furniture in the waiting room now scattered with thistles to stop visitors sitting down.

The museum relies on a lot of Freud’s writings, with interpretation in German and English, but the backstory from Althoff is more perceptive. He was mostly interested in research – “it was not Freud’s plan to work with the couch” – but went into practice to disprove his mother-in-law’s suspicions that he’d never make money. He eventually would charge the equivalent of $375 an hour, which he’d keep in a safe not unearthed until the 2020 renovations.

Freud founded the first Viennese school of psychotherapy, believing life’s driving force was the conflict between love and strife, whereas his contemporary Alfred Adler’s second school based it around individual power. Yet 15 minutes’ walk from Freud’s place lived Viktor Frankl, champion of the third school or dimension, which is about meaning and destiny. Frankl (1905-1997) was a neurologist and psychiatrist, and his apartments are less of a museum than a classroom, and it’s not a passive experience. The walls are festooned with calls to action such as, “It’s on us how we choose to react to adversity”, giving by way of example Covid, climate and Ukraine. If you complain, “No one loves me”, your response should be to become a loving person.

For many “answers” to his propositions, you need to open drawers or doors. Or you can hear Frankl speak on the Burning Questions, 10 topics of life and meaning. “I ask myself who is stronger – me or my stronger self,” he tells an interviewer. “There is a way to defy our weaker self.” It’s as if the first two dimensions identify life’s forces, while Frankl’s third, which he called logotherapy, gives us the tools to use them.

If you decide your response, he observed, you don’t have to be the victim, a telling belief for someone who spent the war in concentration camps.

And although he went on to be celebrated worldwide, with 32 books and 29 honorary doctorates, the Viennese believe Frankl’s work is still undervalued. Although not by Freud who, when they did meet, said: “You are right about the third dimension.”

“Freud is connected with almost everything here in Vienna,” Althoff observes, and maybe his spirit is with us at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which this amateur archaeologist loved to visit, or savouring a pistachio Mozart Torte at his favourite Cafe Landtmann on Ringstrasse.

Freud influenced more than just psychoanalysts, and Vienna got to see how this year when a major exhibition was held at the Lower Belvedere palace-cum-gallery. Dali-Freud: An Obsession was a dive into surrealism as directed by the artist’s affinity with the doctor. No significant Dali works are permanently held in Vienna; he never got a toehold because the Nazis were very suspicious of ­surrealism.

Belvedere guide Markus Hubl says “surrealism would never have been born without the theories of Freud”, whose ideas on desire drove Dali’s use of certain symbols in his work. As we stand before The Lugubrious Game (1929), where the artist has painted himself with a grasshopper over his mouth, Hubl reveals how Dali had a paranoid hate of the insects, connecting them to the worrisome size of his phallus.

Dali visited Vienna several times but was unable to arrange a meeting. “My three voyages were exactly like three drops of water which lacked the reflections to make them glitter,” he wrote. After they did connect, in London in 1938, Dali commented: “I have met a very old man who didn’t understand surrealism.” Perhaps because they barely understood each other’s heavily accented English.

In such a hotbed of culture and thought, removing oneself from Vienna to clear the mind was a regular practice for Freud and Frankl, and you don’t have to go far to see how. By a grassy meadow only 7km from Vienna’s historic Innere Stadt city centre once stood a hotel, the Bellevue, where Freud had a nascent revelation. He later wrote to a friend: “Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed, inscribed with these words: In this house on July 24th 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud.”

That day came in 1977, when a plaque was unveiled in a corner of the meadow by his daughter Anna.

Viennese love to picnic on the Bellevuewiese overlooking their lovely city, drinking wine vintaged all around them. Vienna has the world’s only significant commercial vineyards within a metropolis. About 80 per cent of it is white and the main product is gemischter satz, a blend of three to five varieties grown and processed together to produce a dry, easy-drinking wine. It can be found in Vienna’s best establishments, such at the 1st District’s sublime Restaurant Schubert where otherwise everything from the vermouth to the crockery is house-made. But on sunny weekends, the producers in these hills open pop-up taverns called heuriger beside the vines, serving the likes of a blood sausage called blutwurst and liptauer (paprika cheese dip).

Frankl and Freud would also swap the city for the Viennese Alps, an easy 90-minute journey to the south. They were seeking “sommerfrische”, to which the literal translation “summer freshness” doesn’t do justice; a “summer tree change” is closer. Frankl came both to clear his mind and challenge it. Taking Austria’s first cable car, the Rax-Seilbahn, to the 1500m plateau above Reichenau, he’d check into the Berggasthof inn, his “home of soul”, before walking the plateau’s trails to glorious viewpoints such as Hollentalaussicht and Jakobskogel. Then he’d summon his stronger self to free-climb the rock faces.

Mountain guide Michael Holzer, who’s written a book on Frankl’s hikes, joins us for a lunch of bratwurst and Emporer’s pancakes at another hostelry, Ottohaus, where Frankl also stayed. As did Freud, who one day was beseeched by the innkeeper to examine his troubled daughter Aurelia. She was Freud’s first recorded hysteria patient and was written up as one of his landmark case studies, paving the way for the likes of Frankl to further the understanding.

“Frankl’s concept of meaning, you can find everywhere up here,” Holzer says. “It’s not a complicated concept from a technical point of view but it’s a great philosophical and archaeological task.”

More to the story

After two years of lockdowns, many landmark Vienna destinations have refreshed and reorganised. The Dali exhibition was the Lower Belvedere’s first after an 18-month transformation, and acclaimed collections of post-1945 Austrian art have found a permanent home at the new Albertina Modern. A museum housing the modern art collection of Heidi Horten has opened near the Vienna State Opera, and pioneering architect Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky (a protege of Adolf Loos, she invented the fitted kitchen) has had her apartment in the 5th District turned into a museum. Meanwhile, the Leopold Museum, with its sights on the 19th century and subsequent modernism, has opened its rooftop to Libelle, a bar with the best Negroni selection in town.

wien.info/en

In the know

The Altstadt Vienna is a unique art hotel next to Vienna’s culture-rich MuseumsQuartier. No two rooms or suites in this melange of old apartments are alike, each decorated with stirring pieces collected by owner Otto Wiesenthal.

With daily direct flights into its hub from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and three times a week from Adelaide, Qatar Airways connects seamlessly to Vienna. Many of its planes now offer the extra privacy of versatile Qsuites in business class, and its Al Mourjan lounge at Hamad airport in Doha last year won World’s Best Business Class Lounge at the Skytrax awards.

Jeremy Bourke was a guest of the Austrian National Tourist Office and Qatar Airways.

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