Evoking Freud's memory: Příbor

Transubjectivity is the emotional resonance we give to a place that evokes memories (Bachelard, 1958/1994). When visiting the site of the Oracle of Delphi, or going to Stratford-upon-Avon and visiting the Bard's surroundings, or seeing one of the homes of Pablo Neruda in Santiago, Chile, each person brings their own subjective experience to the meaning of their encounter. At Finca Vigía, Hemingway's home in Havana, his old Royal typewriter sits upon his desk in an open and light-filled writing room. An overwhelming feeling of joy filled me with delight when I was in the space where Hemingway wrote The old man and the sea, a favorite book of my youth. These are transubjective experiences, as everyone has a self-experience of these same spaces that evokes their own associations and memories.

My experience in Příbor, as I walked up the stairs to the second floor and entered the one small room in which Freud's family had lived, similarly evoked a profound experience. In Freud's birth home, his siblings and his parents ate their meals, cooked, cleaned, bathed, and played in this small living quarter. Encountering this space added a new dimension to the experience of understanding a bit more about Freud's early life. Each of the participants at this Příbor Symposium had a transubjective experience to the space of Freud's birth home as we explored and shared our perception of Freud's early roots.

This volume, “Freud in Příbor, the birthplace of Sigmund Freud,” is a monographic issue of the papers delivered in Příbor, Czech Republic, at a symposium on “Psychological birth and infant development.” When Eva Papiasvili, the former Executive Director and Dean at the Institute of the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society, and Linda Mayers, the former Dean of Training at the Institute, invited me to join in this symposium, I contacted Marco Conci, the Co-Editor of this journal. He learned that his colleague, Léon Wurmser, was also attending the Symposium. Eventually, one hundred and