Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City

Freud's desire to get away from Vienna, where he had always lived, except for his first years in Příbor and his last months in London, was a leitmotif throughout his life. His keen passion for travel not only won out over his fear of trains; it became a genuine necessity for him. In correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud reveals his feverish desire to periodically escape the Viennese routine in order ‘to gather as much energy and objectivity as is possible’ (Freud, 1985, p. 325). Each trip in fact had its own profound impact and allowed him to experience previously unfamiliar realities that would ultimately leave indelible imprints on his personal and professional writings. In keeping with Carl E. Schorske's assertions, Freud's experiences outside the Austro-Hungarian capital played a critical role in the education of the father of psychoanalysis. More specifically, the places he visited took on powerful emotional significance for Freud. If England, on the one hand, symbolized ‘masculine virtue’, the cradle of liberal thinking that gave him a window onto the rigid puritanical systems of law and order, on the other was Paris, which became the symbol par excellence of libido and the irrationality, a ‘feminine’ city where the young Freud made his first forays into the human psyche and ‘opened himself to the whole world of forbidden fleurs du mal that Freud the Anglophile and liberal Jew had until then rejected or avoided’ (Schorske, 1991, p. 14). In the same way, affirms Schorske, Rome harked back to his childhood and his controversial relationship with his father, while Athens was more strongly linked to his passion for the mythical Greek past and the world of classical culture. Nevertheless, few scholars have stopped to reflect on another city that Freud visited and that, as we will see in this paper, played a significant role in his life.