Sigmund Freud is alive and well in Vienna.
Were he still living, he'd be the most surprised of anyone and might also be the most pleased because, despite Freud's love/hate relationship with the city in which he endured anti-Semitism and the slings and arrows of derision for more than three quarters of a century, he never contemplated living elsewhere until the Nazi invaders forced him to seek exile in England in 1938.
Recently, in Vienna, with two major simultaneous exhibitions honoring him from October 20, 1999, through February 6, 2000, Sigmund Freud's face and name proclaimed his presence on posters pasted on kiosks and colorful banners flying high over the doorways of the displays.
One was the traveling Library of Congress exhibition, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture.” It opened in Washington, D.C., in October 1998, after being delayed by a two-year spate of anti-Freud objections. The assemblage of hundreds of items — the most extensive the Library of Congress has ever mounted — moved on to its second setting at the Jewish Museum in New York before its sumptuously displayed Viennese edition at the Austrian National Library, where it had grown in size. After closing in February, it traveled to the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, and it will continue on to the Field Museum in Chicago, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and possible other venues.
The second exhibit, at the Sigmund Freud Museum, is an ambitious undertaking. Here, Sigmund Freud, His Family and Colleagues, 1928–1947, filmed by my late father, Philip R. Lehrman, which I edited and produced as a documentary film, is the sole basis of the exhibition, “Psychoanalyse in Bewegung,” a play on words that translates into “Psychoanalysis in Motion.” The exhibit concentrates on the more than fifty members of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Institute who my father filmed during 1928–29, the year he studied with Sigmund Freud. A still frame of each member with a brief bio is displayed in glass cases, along with books and manuscripts they wrote; the film, on an endless video loop, is shown every hour on the hour.
The exhibit, which was extended to April 2, focuses on the parallel histories of psychoanalysis and cinema. Some excerpts from its brochure:
Psychoanalysis … rapidly gained acceptance in a popular medium that was as young as it was itself — film. … Cinema … transformed the … terminology of psychoanalysis into everyday language. … Only a few documentary films deal with the psychoanalytic movement and its representatives. The film “Sigmund Freud, His Family and Colleagues, 1928–1947,” is one of the rare examples. … Film clips from Vienna, Berlin and Paris, shot in the style of a family record, weave together a personal journey and the history of psychoanalysis. … Lehrman began editing his film … in the nineteen fifties, long after psychoanalysis had been driven out of Europe by national socialism. His daughter Lynne Lehrman Weiner completed the film after her father's death … a visual fantasy is created. … It brings to mind Freud's description of psychoanalysis as “an exquisitely social undertaking.” … Through his film Lehrman has shed light on the “family” ties that link cinema and psychoanalysis.
The museum at 19 Berggasse occupies the apartment where Freud and his family lived since 1891 and where Freud also had his office. At the opening of the exhibit, I gave an introduction to the film in German. (Although it was my first language, I hadn't spoken it very much since I was a child.) I included memories of being in that apartment a number of times during that year, especially one time when I was about two and a half and sat on Freud's lap. But I was so interested in playing with his dogs that I refused his request to sing for him. I have regretted that ever since.
Many people in the city have been abuzz about the exhibits. The media gave them their full attention, and special parties for the participants were given by members of the thriving psychoanalytic community and by the mayor of the city.
The Library of Congress exhibit uses three minutes from the documentary film, and I was glad to be part of both of these two important exhibitions. The banners, posters, and brochures, with a slightly blurred image of Freud's face taken from my film, and Wilhelm Reich's photograph of my father holding his 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera bring Freud and my father back to life.
I believe Freud would have been happy to see his place in history finally acknowledged by the city of Vienna. I, too, am happy to have seen Sigmund Freud and my father in Vienna, alive and honored.
Lynne Lehrman Weiner, B.S., is a writer, editor, and film documentarian.