To truly get into the right headspace, you could do no better than a jaunt to Vienna. One of the most elegant of European cities, the Austrian capital is where you can find the Sigmund Freud Museum, possibly one of Europe’s most intriguing museums because it’s more about the mind – yours and his – than the matter, even though there is that too. Set in the flat in which Freud lived and raised his family and maintained his practice – Berggasse 19 – it is a bracing dip, or slip, into the birthplace of psychoanalysis itself (a foreshadowing of a time when people everywhere employ words like “triggered” and talk about their “trauma”).
Sigmund Freud, 1932. Photo: API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
The quarters, too, are where Freud wrote most of his books, and from which he and his family had to famously flee the Nazis in 1938. Where you can even cast your eyes on the shrink’s actual doctor’s bag (with the initials S.F. marked on it, of course), and see the room where he had the world’s first psychoanalysis practice. The famous couch, however, is no longer here; it ended up in Freud’s house in Hampstead, London. However, in lieu of the actual piece of furniture, the Berggasse museum has collected famous artworks from Max Ernst to Man Ray, involving sofas, and every Sunday has a screening of Andy Warhol’s erotic film Couch.
Sigmund Freud’s office (and now, museum) on Berggasse 19 . Photo: Panther Media GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
That’s just one of the many charms in this, the city of Wes Andersonian panache and Habsburg bequests. Home of Haydn, Mozart and Schubert; of Klimt and wiener schnitzel. Where even its cafés come with the whirl of history – like when we stopped into 400-year-old Zum Schwarzen Kameel (it literally means to the black camel), a café visited by Napoleon himself and a hangout of Beethoven’s too. Interestingly, it is so named because it was founded by Johann Baptist Cameel in 1618, as a market store selling spices from far-flung locales (Vienna once being an important trade route to the Ottoman Empire), and he played on his name. A shot of espresso, please, with a side of the unconscious.
