Take a trip to Vienna and in no time at all you’ll understand why Freud came up with psychoanalysis.
If you’re one of those well-balanced people who think that psychoanalysis is only for sad folk who don’t have enough friends to buy them a beer and to tell them to stop being such a big girl’s sponge bag and take their thumb out of their mouths and bury their self-pity under a couple of good jokes about nuns and cucumbers or just to take a couple of doses of mindless exploitative sex by way of treatment, then you really could do with a long weekend in Vienna. Anyone who thinks Sigmund Freud needed his head examined and who knows a bloke who caught his father giving himself a Brazilian with wax from an altar candle while he happened to be wearing his sister’s underwear and eating figs out of a stiletto and he’s still a straight-up guy who’s never had a trick-cyclist moment, then you really should think about spending some time in Vienna.
After two hours in the city you suddenly understand Freud and the whole analysis thing. It all makes sense. Or at least it makes perfect sense to the Viennese. They are quite possibly the most unexpressive and repressed people you’ll ever meet en masse, and that includes Eskimos in January. Somewhere outside Vienna there is a mass grave where they’ve buried all their emotions.
Freud could have only come up with analysis in Vienna. This is dysfunction central. In fact, I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened to mental illness if Freud had lived in Brazil and Jung in Ghana. (It is a known tonto fact that all nutters go doolally sycophantically to please their doctors. So Freudian patients have Freudian fruit-loops, and Jungians are two Jungian sandwiches short of an ego picnic.) Brazilian analysis would’ve been quite different to Austrian. Vienna is the Greenwich Mean Time of bats in the barn. To start with, the city looks like a very elaborate, very disturbed dream. You walk through streets of buildings encrusted and barnacled with obsessive frotting decorations and it makes you wonder who planned them and whoever said, yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking for, with a lot of flying angels and eagles with crowns fighting the fish people over the front door. And I like the 20-foot naked elves holding up the stable.
Vienna is a plaster-and-marble porn show of violent nudity. They’re everywhere; look up and there’s always a straining buttock looking back at you. This all obviously started off as being a bit of neoclassical decorative fun and municipal showing-off but soon it became a vast art-therapy class of collective neuroses. Vienna is one big dream therapy session. You look at the pulsating, perky and penetrative porticos and then you look at the Viennese walking underneath them and you realise that they’re thought bubbles of unconscious desire, the mumbling of the Austrian id. What you’d never guess by just looking at them – conservative, straight-laced and buttoned-up to the neck, hatted and polite and quite polished. And nutty as a chipmunk’s breakfast.
The result of the surreal culmination of this righteous probity with the marble profligacy is to make everything seem like a Freudian slip. Waiters arrive and leer, ‘Would you like cream on that?’ and you feel yourself blushing, and every single waiter says it. ‘Do you want cream on that?’ About everything. Cream and whipped cream are the optional extras to all of Austrian gastronomy, and, one suspects, quite a lot of other Austrian life as well. Every culture has its endemic condiment: chilli, ketchup, mayonnaise, vinegar, mustard; Austrians like their cream. After a bit you realise there are few things that aren’t improved by a fatty, frothy Freudian squirt.
I predict that Vienna is set to become this year’s fashionable European city. We’ve had a couple of decades of discovering the great baroque and Baltic cities from divided Europe and now Riga and Prague, Budapest and Tallinn have been swamped by stag parties and boy racers rallying Porches across the autobahn of socialism for charity, and it’s time to look again at the unfashionable Old World Europe, and you can’t get much more unfashionable and Old World than Vienna. It doesn’t even make an effort to get with it. Occasional excrescences of Euromunicipal public-space sculpture look even more absurdly temporary and graffiti-like in Vienna than they do in other places.
The conservative nature of the city is a lot of its charm. People here aren’t friendly, they’re polite, and once you get used to the idea that the waiter isn’t going to ask you how you are and tell you his nickname and mention how great you’re looking or compliment you on your choice of water, but just say good morning and ask what you’d like, it’s actually a blessed relief. You walk through the opulent shopping streets and look at the goods crammed into them and you realise that this is a city from a time before life’s long diet and guilty consumption. Before fur was a moral issue rather than one of insulation. Where it was decided that tradition will always trump innovation.
This may lead to a sort of entrenched, institutionalised collective conservatism, but after years and years of chasing the new and the latest thing, and after the everchanging menu of experience and entertainment, it’s nice to be relieved of the relentless urban chores of the contemporary. More than a relief, it feels somehow adult. Vienna is undoubtedly a grown-up city, and has been for a few hundred years. Their neuroses and dirty little obsessions come from before the First World War. Vienna may be mad, but it’s old mad. It’s been spared the whole 20th-century me-me-me New-Age fashion therapy and the self-absorption of the modern age. Here men and women aren’t from Venus or Mars, they’re from Innsbruck and a very good family in the Tyrol.
And it makes you realise how much of travel is an excuse to not behave your age, to slip the leash of responsibility and commitment. Abroad gives us permission to drink, behave, letch and, worst of all, dress like our teenage selves. It’s about being childish, and Vienna isn’t like that. Restaurants don’t have a dress code – they don’t need one because Vienna has a dress code. You dress your age, and appropriately to dine with other grown-ups. And only when you’re wearing a jacket and tie can you get an infantile whipped-cream moustache.