Shadow of a Couch

In June 1938, a few weeks after the Nazis took power in Austria, Sigmund Freud and his family left their Vienna apartment in Berggasse 19 to go into exile. After the books, furniture, and the collection of antiquities had been packed up, the photographer Edmund Engelman returned for a moment to the empty rooms. He had just taken a series of pictures that would provide a precious visual testimony in years to come, but at this moment, he was most struck by a feature of the vacated space: a dark spot on the parquet floor where the famous psychoanalytic couch had stood.

Many years later, a young historian was intrigued by this “shadow” of the couch, a memory image invoked in a conversation she had with the photographer. She had come from the Eastern part of Tyrol to Vienna for her studies and decided to specialize in the history of psychoanalysis—an uncommon and, at least from an academic point of view, quite risky choice. When she met Engelman in 1995, Lydia Marinelli already worked at Berggasse 19, a place which had since 1971 become the address of a museum and of a research library. Within the following decade she took up the challenge radically to transform a “site stripped of its material core” (Marinelli and Traska 2002, 3). The quasi-magical effect of an address and a name alone had turned the Freud Museum into one of Vienna's most popular tourist attractions. Through Marinelli's efforts it was soon known as well for some of the most inventive intellectual work in the history of psychoanalysis. In a city where Sigmund Freud had been turned, as had so many other great figures of Austria's glorious past, into a piece of merchandise, a set of highly original