Editorial

Freud's daily life was rooted in one place for nearly all his working life. And his place in history has been so firmly linked to that one place — Berggasse 19, Vienna — and its historical and cultural moment. Yet his self-image was that of the conquistador; travel to other places was of the utmost importance to his inner world. He never ventured, except on one occasion, outside of Europe. Nonetheless, his creation, psychoanalysis, cannot be properly understood without giving due significance to the voyage of discovery and to the project of a science of hidden places (modelled on archaeology). Justifiably, then, Freud's journeys and his incorporation of other places and times into his fundamental picture of the world, its history and its meaning, have been researched in great detail by many scholars and footstep followers. This issue of Psychoanalysis and History displays on its cover a map of Trieste, taken from a Baedeker, the indispensable guide for cultured German-speaking travellers. Trieste was the first place outside of Vienna that Freud went to work — in 1876, aged 20. Laura Gandolfi's ‘Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City’ recounts the significance of the place of Trieste for the young Freud, asking and answering questions about his experience there as a young biologist, the places that made a significant impression upon him and the connections between this ‘in-between, versatile and ambiguous city’ and his life in Vienna and later development of psychoanalysis, and thereby throwing new light on that distinctively Freudian place — ‘the crossroads between science, art and archaeology’.

Patricia Cotti contributes a further chapter to her scholarly investigation of the function of ‘history’ within the unfolding and development of Freud's psychoanalytic theories in an unexpectedly forgotten episode in the development of Freud's famously infamous speculative exploration of human prehistory in Totem and Taboo — a debate over Fritz Wittels's engagingly i