New exhibition
On Freud’s couch
Berlin’s popular Jewish museum dedicates an unusual exhibition to Sigmund Freud and his invention
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis would have turned 150 in 2006. In celebration, Berlin’s popular Jewish museum has dedicated an unusual exhibition to him and his invention.
Taking the most important stages in Sigmund Freud’s life and his best-known case studies as a starting point, the exhibition leads visitors into an interactive labyrinth of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, allowing insight into the worlds of obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the castration complex, and the superego.
The exhibition illustrates how almost everyone – correctly or incorrectly, consciously or unconsciously – employs psychoanalytical concepts today.
The instrument most central to psychoanalysis receives particular attention: the couch. Film clips from 100 years of cinema and photographs of couches of Berlin psychoanalysts are combined in a unique installation conveying some of the fascination and secrecy surrounding psychoanalysis.
The museum is taking the exhibit one step further by offering a tour through Freud’s Berlin. The father of psychoanalysis spent a great deal of time in the German capital especially after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1923.
“For me, as well as for you… beauty resides in Italy and around the Mediterranean Sea – although that did not stop me from nearly becoming a Berliner myself,” Freud wrote his friend, the writer Georg Hermann, in 1936. Since the early 1920s, Freud made frequent trips to Berlin to visit friends and relatives.
Tour of Berlin
Many of his former students and colleagues also settled in Berlin. Some of them were instrumental in setting up the Psychoanalytical Institute of Berlin which thrived in the 1920s.
The institute was taken over by Nazi ideology in 1933 and renamed the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy. Its new leadership had hoped to give psychoanalysis a typically National Socialist face. But it failed and the institute closed its doors in 1938.
The four-hour tour of Berlin’s psychoanalytic past is also a means for the museum to collect funds for several remembrance plaques that are to be placed around Berlin in honor of influential Jewish psychoanalysts who were forced to go into exile.
The couch and its symbols
In Vienna, The Sigmund Freud Museum has organized a number of events in the Austrian capital and abroad. Its main exhibit centers on Freud’s famous couch. “The Couch: Thinking in Repose” focuses on the different levels of interpretation that this piece of furniture conveys as the embodiment of Freud’s theory and practice.
The exhibition is devoted to the origin of the psychoanalytical scenario and includes cultural aspects of the couch as a recliner as well as its significance and function over the years. It also points out cross-references in literature, art and medicine in the 19th, 20th and 21st century.
So far, over 53,000 visitors have visited the Berlin exhibit. Because of the unexpectedly high volume of visitors, the museum has extended the exhibit through September 24. The Vienna exhibit runs until 5 November.
Jewish Museum Berlin – Lindenstr. 9-14, 10969 Berlin Tel: +49 (30) 259 93 419
Sigmund Freud Museum - Berggasse 19, A-1090 Vienna Tel.: +43(1) 319 15 96
Reprinted with permission of the European Jewish Press
