Authors: Eric Weiner
I have an appointment with Dr. Freud, and I want to keep it. No, that’s not the whole truth. Part of me wants to go but another part resists. This defiance no doubt stems from some deeply submerged childhood trauma, quite possibly involving my mother, but there is no time now for this sort
of psychic excavation. I mustn’t keep the good doctor waiting, not with his profound psychological insights and strict cancellation policy. Besides, if any one person encapsulates the intellectual hothouse that was Vienna, it is Sigmund Freud. He had a complex relationship with the city, one replete with all of the competing motives and unconscious wish fulfillment that the good doctor traded in.
I step softly, lightly, out of the Hotel Adagio and onto the Ringstrasse, with its grand buildings and elegant cafés, virtually unchanged since Freud’s time. Freud loved the Ringstrasse and every day at precisely 2:00 p.m., rain or shine, circled it, walking at a brisk, almost frenetic pace. Clearly, he was sublimating.
The day is gray and drizzly, but I don’t mind. I take quiet pleasure in each step, savoring the delicious fact that Freud walked here, too.
On this very ground.
What was he thinking as he marched so determinedly around the Ringstrasse? Was he fuming about having been passed over, yet again, for promotion to full professor? Was he furious that
The Interpretation of Dreams
, now a classic, had sold a measly three hundred copies in its first printing? Perhaps he was in a more upbeat mood, relishing his latest archaeological acquisition, plotting a home for it among the growing collection of statues and other artifacts that threatened to subsume his study. Perhaps Freud wasn’t thinking about anything at all as he placed one foot in front of the other, but was simply
being
, in a Buddhist way, but that strikes me as highly unlikely. Freud was always turning over
something
in his mind, trying to solve an old problem, or discover a new one.
Freud was neither born in Vienna nor did he die here, yet the city shaped him, molded him, in ways large and small. Vienna midwifed his radical ideas about the human mind—ideas that could, I’m sure, only have taken flight in the Vienna of 1900. They would certainly have gained little altitude in his hometown of Freiberg, Moravia (now located in the Czech Republic). Population forty-five hundred, it was myopic and rabidly anti-Semitic, “an excellent place for his family to leave,” writes Freud biographer Janine Burke. And leave they did, when Sigmund was only four years old. Had they not, we would not recognize the name Sigmund Freud.
Vienna became home, and home is always complicated. The more I learn about Freud’s thorny, troubled relationship with Vienna, the more I am reminded of Mozart’s equally hot-and-cold rapport with the city. Infuriated by slights, real and imagined, the composer regularly threatened to decamp to Paris or London, but could never bring himself to leave his beloved Vienna. Like Mozart, Freud was alternately ignored, loved, and despised, his reputation ebbing and flowing like the Danube in a storm. Like Mozart, Freud vacillated wildly. Sometimes, he spoke fondly of “my Vienna,” but more often chose considerably harsher words for his adopted home. He once described the City of Dreams (so named, ironically, because of Freud’s dream theory, which was at first roundly mocked) as “almost physically repulsive.” Its inhabitants had “grotesque and animal-like faces . . . deformed skulls and potato noses.” Such mutual enmity is one reason why Freud enjoyed a better reputation abroad than he did at home, the fate of many a genius.
As much as Vienna infuriated him (“I could beat my Viennese with a stick”), it also inspired him. Sometimes we find more inspiration in the places (and people) that annoy us than in those that please us. Freud needed Vienna, and Vienna needed Freud, though neither could bring themselves to admit it. What exactly was it about Vienna that, despite Freud’s objections, goaded him toward greatness? Did he flourish here despite his troubled relationship with the city, or because of it?
When asked about the secret to a happy life, Freud famously answered,
“Liebe und Arbeit.”
Love and work. He engaged in both activities wholeheartedly, unapologetically, at the same address: Berggasse 19. The Victorian building served as home office, meeting room, smoking lounge, library, and archaeological museum. Surely, I think, as I veer off the Ringstrasse and onto a side street, Freud’s old address contains valuable clues into the greatness that was fin de siècle Vienna. But where is it? Once again, my GPS has failed me.
Then I turn a corner and—wham!—Freud hits me in the face like a therapeutic breakthrough. A bright red banner emblazoned with the letters F-R-E-U-D practically screams across the decades, demanding my attention. There’s nothing subliminal or
un
about the sign. It is pure id.
Freud would not approve. He regarded the obvious with the same contempt most of us reserve for wine spritzers.
Berggasse 19, the solidly middle-class address where Freud overturned centuries of thinking about the human mind, today sits directly across the street from a thrift shop and an upmarket day spa offering hot-stone massages and mani-pedis. What does that
mean
? I wonder. I find myself asking that question a lot lately. It’s inevitable, I suppose, when following in the smoke rings of the founder of psychoanalysis. I need to be careful, I remind myself, and silently vow to remain vigilant against this sort of overreach, to remember that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, that not every sign is a SIGN.
I enter Berggasse 19 just as Freud did, through a set of heavy wooden doors and up a wide, marble staircase that exudes solidity. Everything about the building does. Did Freud’s patients find that sturdiness reassuring? Did it alleviate concerns about placing their health, mental
and
physical, in the hands of a quack, a madman (Jewish no less) who traded in fairy tales? Did they know that, as they climbed these solid stairs, as I am now, they were embarking on a journey into uncharted depths of the human psyche? Did some, I wonder, turn back at the last minute? Or did they soldier on, reassured by Freud’s credentials, or perhaps the recommendation of a friend who had been cured by the Moravian doctor? It was, I suspect, naked desperation that propelled these troubled souls, Vienna’s worried wealthy, up the stairs and across the threshold into the pleasantly cluttered office of Herr Doktor.
“Welcome to Berggasse nineteen,” I hear. The Voice is back. This time, appropriately, it has acquired a compassionate yet clinical tone. I feel reassured. All is well. Almost immediately, though, the Voice disappoints, as voices are wont to do. “If you are expecting to see the famous couch here, I have some bad news.” Alas, explains the Voice, the couch is in London, where in 1938 Freud, one step ahead of the Nazis, fled to safety.
Okay, no couch. I can live with that. It’s only a couch, I tell myself, and besides, a photo of it is on display here. Swollen with pillows and covered with a Persian rug, a colorful Qashqai, I have to admit, it looks inviting. Give me a few minutes on it, and I’d open up, too.
I step inside the entrance hall, and the century separating Freud and me instantly evaporates. The small space sits frozen in time, as if the good doctor had stepped out for a moment, perhaps for his afternoon constitutional around the Ringstrasse, and will return any minute now. There’s his hat and walking stick, his traveling trunk, his leather doctor’s bag, chunky and reassuring, a tartan blanket and a small pocket flask that Freud carried with him on his daily walks. Freud, a man of habit, kept the same furniture all his life. I’m reminded of Florence’s good materialists. If ever there was a man of lofty ideas, it was Sigmund Freud, yet he also felt compelled to ground himself in the tactile world, lest he drift away into a permanent dream state.
The doorplate is the original and reads
PROF. DR. FREUD
. The doctor part came relatively easily, but not the professor title. Time and again, Freud was passed over for a full professorship, in favor of lesser candidates. His interest in the controversial topic of human sexuality surely didn’t help his case, nor did his Jewishness. He persevered and eventually got that promotion, though only after two well-connected patients lobbied on his behalf.
Nearby, in the waiting room, I see a deck of tarock cards. He loved to play the local game, as he did most things Viennese. Whatever he said about the city, Freud was, in habit if not disposition, typically Viennese. Every morning he’d sit down with the
Neue Freie Presse
, the popular, devoutly liberal, and largely Jewish daily. At his favorite coffeehouse, the Landtmann, he sipped
einen kleinen Braunen
(a short black coffee) and, when hiking in the Alps, wore lederhosen and a feathered hat. Like many Jewish immigrants, Freud strived to be
überwienerisch
, more Viennese than the Viennese. Assimilation was the goal or, as Steven Beller puts it in his history of Viennese Jewry, “to become an invisible Jew.” Alas, that proved impossible. In Austria at that time, there was no such thing as an invisible Jew. Vienna accepted outsiders into the fold, but only up to a point.
During Freud’s day, a severe minimalism was in vogue, a movement spearheaded by the controversial architect Adolf Loos, but you wouldn’t know it glancing around Freud’s apartment. His taste, while not quite Beethovenian, favored Victorian coziness. “Cluttered plentitude” is how
Freud biographer Peter Gay describes it. Every inch of space was covered with
something
: Oriental carpets, photographs of friends, etchings, and, of course, books.
I walk into what was his old consulting room and see black-and-white photos of the Freuds. A young Sigmund, no older than six, standing next to his father, Jacob, a struggling and hapless wool merchant (“unheroic” in Freud’s mind). They had recently arrived in Vienna, the Voice tells me.
As an immigrant, Freud was well positioned for greatness. A disproportionately large number of geniuses, from Victor Hugo to Frédéric Chopin, were geographically displaced, voluntarily or otherwise. One survey of twentieth-century geniuses found that one-fifth were first- or second-generation immigrants. That dynamic holds true today. Foreign-born immigrants account for only 13 percent of the US population but have nearly a third of all US patents granted and are 25 percent of all US Nobel laureates. Being an immigrant is one of the two most common life experiences of geniuses, along with “familial unpredictability,” a redundancy if ever there was one.
Why are immigrants more likely to achieve genius status? The conventional explanation is that they belong to a closely knit group that is fiercely motivated. Immigrants have something to prove. I find that explanation accurate but incomplete. Sure, immigrant status might explain their economic rise, but what about their creative edge? Why would being born in another country make your ideas richer, your art more sublime?
Researchers believe the answer lies in “diversifying experiences,” which Dutch psychologist Simone Ritter defines as “
highly unusual
and
unexpected
events or situations that are actively experienced and that push individuals outside the realm of ‘normality.’ ” When this happens, we develop greater “cognitive flexibility”; that is, we see the world around us with fresh eyes.
Simply knowing of another way of looking at the world opens up possibilities and enhances cognitive flexibility, and the immigrant is, by dint of his life experience, exposed to these alternative viewpoints. Immigrants have more ingredients to work with than nonimmigrants, and
that
can
lead to greater creativity. I say
can
because simply being exposed to a foreign culture will have zero impact on your creativity if you remain closed to new ways of thinking. Our minds don’t automatically expand when confronted with something unusual. The opposite may happen. We may shrink, retreat psychologically, when confronted with the Other. So why do some people respond to a multicultural environment by becoming more open, and others by shutting down, or retreating to bigotry?
Psychologists aren’t sure but suspect it comes down to obstacles. Immigrants face all sorts of obstacles and constraints, and constraints—or, more precisely,
our reactions
to these constraints—are the fuel that feeds the fires of creativity. For instance, as a young man Freud wanted to join the military, but that profession was closed to him as a Jew. He briefly considered a career as a lawyer, but one day he heard a lecture in which Goethe’s essay “On Nature” was read, which said, “Nature! She hides under a thousand names and phrases and is always the same.” Freud was mesmerized by those words and vowed to become a research scientist. Alas, practical matters—money—intervened. Research didn’t pay well enough for him to start a family, so he pivoted, settled on a career in medicine. Had he not, he would never have seen those “hysterical” patients and might never have stumbled upon his theory of the unconscious.
Freud may be a household name today, but in the Vienna of 1900 he was known (if he was known at all) as a “dogged and awkward loner . . . an inconvenient outsider,” recalled his friend Stefan Zweig. Freud’s now-celebrated theories were greeted with a yawn, and a sneer, as a bunch of “fairy tales.” That’s not surprising. All genuinely creative ideas are initially met with rejection, since they necessarily threaten the status quo. An enthusiastic reception for a new idea is a sure sign that it is not original.
This rejection burned at Freud, infuriated him—and hardened his resolve. “Freud’s intellectual originality and professional isolation fed off one another,” writes Carl Schorske in his history of fin de siècle Vienna. As we saw in Athens, some people are devastated by rejection while others are motivated by it. Why such different reactions? As you recall, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that rejection boosts creativity most markedly in those who consider themselves “independent minded”;
that is, those who stand apart from the world, who rejoice in their Otherness. Freud, a self-proclaimed “conquistador,” certainly fit the bill.