This picture tells a story, like most
things associated with Sigmund Freud. It is the sign in Vienna in the Berggasse
indicating where the museum dedicated to Sigmund Freud is located. Berggasse
can be translated as Mountain Alley. The sign is like the tip of an iceberg.
But first:
The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna is a museum founded in 1971
covering the Sigmund Freud’s 's life story. It is located in the Alsegrund
district, at Berggasse 19. In 2003 the museum was put in the hands of the
newly-established Sigmund Freud Foundation, which has since received the entire
building as an endowment. It also covers the history of psychoanalysis.
The building was newly built
in 1891 when Freud moved there. The previous building on the site, once the
home of Victor Adler, had been torn down.
His old rooms, where he
lived for 47 years and produced the majority of his writings, now house a
documentary centre to his life and works. The influence of psychoanalysis on
art and society is displayed through a program of special exhibitions and a
modern art collection.
The museum consists of
Freud's former practice and a part of his old private quarters. Attached to the
museum are Europe's largest psychoanalytic research library, with 35,000
volumes, and the research institute of the Sigmund Freud Foundation.
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| Freud Museum Příbor |
The display includes
original items owned by Freud, the practice's waiting room, and parts of
Freud's extensive antique collection. However his famous couch is now in the Freud
Museum in London, along with most of the original furnishings, as Freud was
able to take his furniture with him when he emigrated. A third Freud Museum,
after London and Vienna, was started in the Czech town of
Příbor in 2006 when the
house of his birth was opened to the public.
The museum contains an
archive of images containing around two thousand documents, mostly photographs,
but also paintings, drawings, and sculptures. The collection consists of almost
all of the existing photos of Sigmund Freud and his family, a large number of
photos of Anna Freud and photos from psychoanalytic congresses etc.
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| Freud Museum London |
In 1938 Freud was forced to
leave German-annexed Austria due to his Jewish ancestry, and fled to London.
The museum was opened in 1971 by the Sigmund Freud Society in the presence of
Anna Freud. In 1996 the building was expanded with new rooms for special
exhibitions and events. The Foundation has ongoing plans to expand the museum.
Since 1970 the annual Sigmund Freud
Lecture has taken place in Vienna on Freud's birthday, 6 May. This event, at
which psychoanalysts speak on a contemporary theme, was established by the
Sigmund Freud Society and is now organised by the Foundation.
The
thing about the sign is that it requires one to incline one’s head slightly to
the left to read it. This is the case from either side. It is mounted on a
sturdy steel pole shaped like a tuning fork. The letters are in Franklin
Gothic, white on a red background. Franklin Gothic and its related faces are realist sans-serif typefaces originated
by Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948) in 1902. “Gothic” is an increasingly
archaic term meaning sans-serif. Franklin Gothic has been used in
many advertisements and headlines in newspapers. The typeface continues to
maintain a high profile, appearing in a variety of media from books to billboards.
Despite a period of eclipse in the 1930s, after the introduction of European
faces like Kabel and Futura, they were re-discovered by American designers in
the 1940s and have remained popular ever since.
The
sign gives every indication of being a very solid modern structure. It stands out and, rather like a drawing pin
on a map to indicate a specific site, it is pinned into the pavement.
It
is a very specific structure. It seems to indicate, that despite the history of
anti-Semitism , Anschluss and National Socialism, this is where the great man
first made his mark. This is where the history of psychoanalysis begins, right
here in the city of Vienna on the Berggasse, and we ask you to tilt your head
in recognition of that. There is a great deal of overcompensating going on
here. So what does this say about the
Austrians?
In
my research, I found another interesting little conundrum. If one looks at Google map and expands the
map to include Europe, by dragging the little man in the top left hand corner
to place it on the map to obtain a street view, one finds that a street view in
Austria is not available, and very few places in Germany have the facility of a
street view. In Austria, the only “street view” is inside a couple of Museums
in Vienna, the Neue Berg Museum, the Schatzkammer and the Kunshistorisches
Museum.
What
would Freud have made of this? Do the Austrians have something to hide? Has the
effect of National Socialism so scarred them that they are wary of the
slightest of photographic intrusions on their lives?
Whether
or not these musings have any significance, I can only repeat that the sign is
but the tip of an iceberg, an iceberg as designed by Freud.
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