The Historian of the Freud Museum: Lydia Marinelli1

The Freud Museum in Vienna is certainly one of the best-known tourist attractions of Europe, drawing crowds of visitors every year. Over the past 15 years, it has also acquired a reputation for being the site of some of the most inventive intellectual work in the history of psychoanalysis. A set of highly original exhibitions, film and lecture series, and conferences all set a new tone that was unheard of in Vienna, a city where Sigmund Freud had been turned, as had so many other of the great figures of Austria's glorious past, into a piece of merchandise. It took the scholarly world and the larger public some time to realize that this fresh and courageous approach was the work of a young historian who was not even Viennese, but had arrived from the Eastern part of the Tyrol.

Those who wanted to pay Lydia Marinelli a visit and were not familiar with the house that had become a museum had a hard time finding her. They had to pass through a secret wooden door that led them into an improvised kitchen, continue down a small corridor and cross the library to find her in a small room located in the last corner. It was not a coincidence that she had chosen the former bedroom of Freud's sister-in-law Minna Bernays as her office where books and boxes piled up. She did not hesitate to satisfy the curiosity of many of her visitors about the fact that Minna could reach