I mmediately above a butcher’s, in a typical Viennese salon apartment, at Berggasse 19, lived the father of psychoanalysis, Sig- mund Freud, with his wife Martha, their six children and his sister-in-law. He moved into this apartment in 1891 and spent 47 years there, until he fled from the Nazis via Paris to London. Here was his famous couch, where his most renowned works were created; here he smoked, a lot, and received many celeb- rity patients; from here he went to the near- by park, to Café Landtmann, to the Muse- um of Art History. He loved ancient Egyptian art and had a rich collection. In 1971, Freud’s home at this Vienna ad- dress, in the presence of his daughter Anna Freud, also a psychoanalyst, was converted into a museum. Ring the bell on the nameplate reading Prof. Dr. Freud, enter the waiting room where the famous Wednesday meetings were held, which later led to the emergence of the Vi- enna Psychoanalytic Society, view scientific works, ashtrays and books, and you inevita- bly realise how little you know about this bril- liant mind, even though you have learned a lot about yourself from him. He was, in his own words, an obses- sive neurotic. The oldest of six children, he was strong- lyattachedtohismother,whocalledhim“My Golden Sigi”, and simultaneously had per- manently poor relations with his father. He was not immediately successful as a doctor. He cut eels into a thousand pieces in search of their reproductive organs, then failed to publish the work. Then he became interest- ed in the medical use of cocaine and was on the right track, until the realisation that it is a dangerous drug prompted him to give up. Sometime later, working on the case of An- na O., who suffered from hysteria, he came upon the idea that the cause of this disor- der was actually in the domain of sexuality. And the rest is history. Despite him gaining professional sat- isfaction, his later life was marked by trage- dy – during World War I he had two sons in the army, one daughter died of flu at the age of 26, and he developed throat cancer and was operated on 30 times. His works were burned when Hitler came to power in Ger- many in 1933, and when the Nazis seized power in Austria five years later, his daugh- ter Anna was led away for Gestapo inter- rogation and he only managed to escape Vienna at the last moment, with the help of influential friend Marie Bonaparte. They didn’t succeed in saving his four sisters, who died in Nazi concentration camps. He spent a brief period living in Lon- don, but his cancer returned within a year of him fleeing Vienna and Freud died in 1939.
There are theories, however, suggesting that a previous agreement prompted his friend and physician, Dr Max Schur, to give him a lethal dose of morphine. He was miserable and often jealous of his colleagues. He had phobias of the numbers 61 and 62, because he thought that he would die during those years, but it was his personal sadness and his fears that led to the most fascinating discoveries of the human soul. Freud’s works show that our rationality “is not even the master of its own house”and that we are constantly driven by instincts, some of which are even beyond our conscious perception. And no matter how controversial his discoveries are today, no matter how they sometimes seem strange and sometimes even ridicu- lous, we should return to Freud, because he gave us great comfort and discovered a great truth – that living as a human be- ing is very difficult.
In 1971, Freud’s home at this Vienna address, in the presence of his daughter Anna Freud, also a psychoanalyst, was converted into a museum Frojdov dom na bečkoj adresi je 1971. godine u prisustvu njegove ćerke Ane Frojd, takođe psihoanalitičarke, pretvoren u muzej
ćerku Anu odveo na informativni raz- govor, napustio je Beč u poslednjem trenutku uz pomoć uticajne prijate- ljice Mari Bonaparte. Njegove četiri sestre se nisu spasle, umrle su u na- cističkim logorima. U Londonu živi kratko, posle godi- nu dana od bekstva iz Beča rak se vra- ća i Frojd umire 1939. Postoje, među- tim, teorije da mu je, po prethodnom dogovoru, prijatelj i lekar dr Maks Šur dao smrtonosnu dozu morfijuma. Bio je nesrećan, često ljubomo- ran na kolege. Imao je fobije od broja 61 i 62, jer je mislio da će u tim godi- nama umreti, a, opet, baš ta njegova lična tuga i njegovi strahovi doveli su do najfascinantnijih otkrića ljud- ske duše. Frojdovi radovi pokazuju da naš racio „nije gospodar čak ni u svojoj kući“ i da smo konstantno vođeni nagonima, od kojih su neki čak i izvan naše svesne percepcije. Ma koliko se danas o njegovim do- stignućima polemisalo, ma koliko ponekad delovala čudno, pokatkad i smešno, Frojdu se treba vraćati, jer nam je pružio veliku utehu i otkrio veliku istinu – da je mnogo teško ži- veti kao ljudsko biće.
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