The couch where psychoanalysis was born
The couch in Dr. Freud’s office
We didn’t get to read The Interpretation of Dreams, which we’d packed for our trip to Vienna. There was so much to see that we could not look at pages. And then we took lots of photos at the Sigmund Freud Museum, which used to be the Freud family apartments. Since we’re maniacal about organizing our files, we transferred the photos into our Mac, which was stolen two days later.
Book unread, photos stolen—if as Dr Freud said there is no such thing as an accident, what does this mean?
Dr. Freud and his dog
Fortunately we bought a couple of postcards from the little museum shop, which carries Freud’s books.
The museum is a recreation of Freud’s office where he saw his patients, with shelves containing his books and collections of tchotchkes, and plenty of photographs. Some rooms are used as contemporary art exhibition spaces. There is a replica of his famous couch—the original is in London. Apparently he didn’t write his books in his office, he would work on them during his travels. There are also home movies narrated by the doctor’s daughter Anna. In one of them, Sigmund is hanging out with his grandson Lucian Freud the artist.
The Freuds fled Vienna for London when the Nazis came to power. They took their furniture with them, and of course their beloved Chows.
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Speaking of dreams and the contents of people’s unconscious, some images from The Art of Dreams in the Public Domain Review.
The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1781). People who have experienced bangungot say it feels like a monster is sitting on their chest. Voila.
Job’s Evil Dreams by William Blake (1805).
The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by Hokusai (1814). Tentacle porn is older than we think.
Dream Vision by Albrecht Durer (1525) with text describing what he saw.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
