Refreshment from Freud’s Faucet: A Birthday Salute to Siggie


Two decades later, during my 40s, we was advantageous to be means to spend summers roving around Europe, mostly sightseeing, nonetheless infrequently studying, training or lecturing there. In a summer of 1999, we was invited to pronounce about my afterwards recently expelled book, Anger, Madness, and a Daimonic, during a Second World Congress for Psychotherapy in Vienna, Austria, Freud’s hometown. (Freud was innate in Freiberg, Moravia, now a Czech Republic, in 1856, nonetheless his family changed to Vienna when he was usually three.) The admittedly Freudian-sounding pretension of my speak was “Myths of a Unconscious.” Vacationing, as was my lush robe then, in Kusnacht–the impossibly pleasing Swiss lakeside village where Freud’s one-time tighten collaborator, C.G. Jung, lived and used and a old-fashioned plcae of a C.G. Jung Institute   (see my review of a movie A Dangerous Method)– we chose to take a scenic ten-hour-train-ride from Zurich to Vienna. (For anyone deliberation creation this pilgrimage, we strongly suggest holding a sight over flying, for there is so many beautiful panorama to see separating a ancestral cities of Jung and Freud, and adequate time to season it.) 

Once staid in a regretful city of Vienna (also a home of psychiatric luminaries like Alfred Adler, Otto Rank and Viktor Frankl) before to delivering my lecture, we set out to revisit Freud’s former chateau and bureau on Berggasse 19 in Vienna‘s ninth district, now a Sigmund Freud Museum. It was mid-summer, with scarcely high temperatures and humidity, even for that typically vehement time of year. we energetically walked a substantial stretch from my hotel to find Freud’s unit in a mid-day swelter, sweating profusely. Finally we arrived during a artless nonetheless architecturally exuberant unit building in that Freud and his family lived from 1891 by 1938 before forced to rush to London from a Nazis, and where he initial analyzed supine patients on his now iconic cot in a infirm days of “psychoanalysis.”

By a time we wearily climbed a stairs and entered a considerable second-story apartment, we was totally desiccated and droughty by a heat. Stepping by Freud’s easy watchful room for his patients and where members of a Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud’s famous “inner circle” met each Wednesday evening, we approached a minimal museum staff and asked either it would be probable to squeeze a bottle of water. They apologetically nonetheless kindly sensitive me that a museum did not sell beverages, bottled or otherwise. During this brief and paltry conversation, we were station only outward of Freud’s strange kitchen, that was totally off-limits to visitors. If we remember correctly, a museum was, during slightest during that time, not air-conditioned. Apparently holding empathize on my overheated condition, to my surprise, a merciful womanlike staff member stepped into a kitchen and returned with an typical potion of daub water–the accurate same H2O from a really same faucet from that Freud himself drank during a initial days of a “talking cure,” what we today, interjection in partial to Otto Rank, some-more generically impute to as “psychotherapy” and, some-more specifically, as “psychodynamic” therapy. In fact, Sigmund Freud’s “psychoanalysis” is a seminal fount from that all complicated psychotherapy some-more or reduction springs. And, nonetheless Freud might have been mistaken about some things, including his engrossment with sex, chauvinism, dogmatism, ostracism of spirituality, and his personal dread of song (see my before post), he was right about most. (See my before post.) Indeed, nonetheless C.G. Jung eventually grown a significantly different, some-more complicated (face-to-face rather than a Freudian couch, for example) proceed in his Analytical Psychology, he never entirely deserted his Freudian foundations. And for good reason. Nor should contemporary psychotherapists. (It should be remarkable that, according to new studies, psychodynamic psychotherapy is during slightest as effective as CBT, DBT and other forms of treatment, and that a profitable effects tend to be some-more fast over time. See, for example, Levy, R, Ablon, J, Kachele, H. (eds.) Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Research: Evidence-Based Practice and Practice-Based Evidence. Humana Press, 2012.)

This elementary nonetheless noted act of affability extended to me during Freud’s home that breathless summer and a heady chronological context felt profoundly suggestive to this once pubescent imbiber of Freud’s supernatural egghead probings into a immeasurable and puzzling inlet of a tellurian psyche, a unconscious. (Hence, a tenure “depth psychology” or Tiefenpsychologie describes a discoveries of both Freud and Jung utterly accurately.) Both as an scientific child starving for knowldege 3 decades before, and many times thereafter, Herr Doktor Freud had once some-more furnished nourishment to this parched soul, long-lived snack from Freud’s faucet. 

 

 

 

 

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