The perplexing Freud

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20-08-07

On a blue-gray August sky, I visited the residence of Sigmund Freud which was made into a museum about 35 years ago. The apartment filled with about 400 artifacts had his original furniture including a velvet red sofa in the waiting room along with a polished wooden bookcase that displayed his books. There was an honoree degree from Clark University in the United States, a correspondence letter with a professor in Haifa in Palestine. But what made the museum priceless and a must-visit was the photos and documents that systematically followed the path of his life. There was the charcoal sketch of Einstein that he received as a gift, the piled up manuscripts, not all on neurobiological subjects, his write-up on Michelangelo’s famous Moses sculpture in San Pietro in Rome under an assumed name. The interesting thing, according to Carl Schorske, was that Freud initially hesitated to go to Rome canceling four trips between 1895 -1898, yet the Italian capital became a goal of his dreams. There was one dream where Rome became the Promised Land from afar where Freud likened Rome to Moses- an interesting observation since it was Rome that had sent the Jewish people into the Diaspora and only recently had uprooted its Jewish ghetto. It wasn’t until Freud could quell his inhibitions with his father through his dreams that he could finally advance to Rome.

The museum isn’t about trying to teach the fundamentals of his theories most famously “The Interpretation of Dreams”, a course in itself to fully comprehend, but rather to allow people to see his personal and professional life through his documents and photos. There are many documents of the works that he published. The photos showed pictures of Freud’s family growing up in what was then Bohemia.

The museum collection although it states that Freud was an atheist Jew, fails to address his cold relationship with his wife - speculation arose that this was the result of the polarizing differences in the couple’s religious beliefs. Carl Schorske in his book on Viennese politics and culture dubbed Freud a liberal Viennese Jew who watched with interest the Dreyfus affair in France. Although Schorske is technically accurate, he is too limited in his assessment. Freud is a product of the enlightenment of Jewry that emerged from Germany in the first half of the 19th century and which that led to nationalist Jews who abandoned religious traditions, but nevertheless maintained a cultural identity by means of intellectual accomplishments. A letter in the museum stated that Freud agreed with Zionist Theodore Herzl about an establishment of a Jewish homeland, he did not see this as a plausible option. Peter Gay- the author of a well-acclaimed biography of Freud speculates that Freud’s marriage may have been marred because his wife came from a religious Orthodox Jewish background while he came from a secular Jewish surrounding. According to Gay, Freud refused to even let his wife light Sabbath candles and his family celebrated Christian holidays which Gay speculates led to a strained marriage. A document in the exhibit displays a 1926 letter that he wrote to the Bnai Brith, an organization that he had been a member of since 1897. He wrote that “obscure emotional forces”, “A clear consciousness of inner identity”, and the most important trait, “The safe privacy of mental construction” defined a Jew for him.

It was Freud’s youngest daughter Anna who lovingly made this apartment into a museum in the early 1970’s with her meticulous planning and networking. The persecution of the Gestapo in 1938 of Anna forced the Freud family to flee to London where Sigmund lived the final year of his life. Anna was an accomplished psychoanalyst who practiced in her family’s apartment- it should be noted that psychoanalysis at the time was a new field that she flourished in and became one of the most respected intellectuals in her specialty of treating children. Anna returned to Vienna for the first time in 1971 since fleeing thirty-three years earlier and donated much of her father works to the museum. She also convinced her father’s colleagues to donate memorabilia, pictures and writings involving Freud to the museum. Some of the rooms of the apartment were rented out to other people, so the complete apartment didn’t become property of the museum until the mid-1980’s, which now allows patrons to view where Anna had her practice which was on the other side of the Freud apartment. Anna passed away in 1982 and her ashes are in a Roman-style urn near her father in London.