“When he was here he had only a few visitors, but now everyone goes,” says the taxi-driver who takes me to Freud’s house and surgery. The rooms are famous, and I myself have been here often, but every time they make a deep impression; in the very atmosphere one can feel the respect and paternal melancholy with which this nineteenth-century gentleman descended into the underworld. In the entrance we find his hat and stick, as if Freud had just come in; there is his medical bag, a travelling trunk and a leather-covered bottle, the drinking flask which he used to take with him on his trips into the woods, which he loved with the precise conventionality of a paterfamilias.
The photographs and documents that cram what was his actual study, portraits of Freud and of the other founders of the new science, and editions of celebrated works, are simply informative and rather banal: this is no longer Freud’s study, but a didactic museum of psychoanalysis, practically reduced to the stereotyped formula that is by now de rigueur in every speech or paper.
But in the small waiting-room there are some books from Freud’s real library: Heine, Schiller, Ibsen, the classics who taught him the prudence, the precision, the humanitas indispensable to any journey to the lower world. That walking-stick and flask tell us everything about the greatness of Freud, his sense of the measure of things and his love of order, his simplicity as a man resolved in himself and free of manias; one who, by plunging into the abysses of human ambivalences, both learns and teaches how to love those family outings in the mountains more, in greater freedom.
Of all this there is little left in the conferences of psychoanalysis: here haphazard salvos, ignorant of syntax, all too often degrade psychoanalysis into an unwitting parody of itself and apply the Oedipus complex to problems of refuse disposal or the monetary spiral. The true heirs of Freud are not the hot-air ideologists who make spectacular use of psychoanalysis as a chewing-gum, but the therapists who with infinite patience help some people to live a little more easily. That modest, reassuring leather bag makes me think of all those to whom I myself owe what little self-confidence I possess, that essential minimum of ability needed to live with the dark places of myself.
At the end of the Himmelstrasse, in a spot with a fine view of the Vienna woods, a monument erected in 1977 in the place called Bellevue states, not without rhetoric: “Here, on July 24th 1895, the secret of dreams revealed itself to Dr Sigm. Freud.” It is droll to think of that Mr Secret who, like an impostor in a comedy, finally takes off the mask.
One prefers to think of that landscape, and of Freud looking at it, reading the curved outlines of the distant city like a map of man’s inner meanderings, never entirely explored. What is touching in that rhetorical inscription is the “Dr”, standing as it does for academic dignity, for demanding studies achieved not without some pride.