Psychoanalysis

Vienna. The home of Sigmund Freud. I walked over to his old house and office today to check out the place where he lived and worked most of his life. For the last two days we have covered most of Vienna's inner city, where all of the interesting sites are to be found.

We spent much of the morning at the Hapsburg compound, a sprawling complex of gigantic baroque buildings with parks and statues sprinkled throughout. Inside we got to lay our eyes on the actual apartments, offices, and bathrooms they used during a six hundred year reign over a vast portion of Europe. It all fell apart when Archduke Ferdinand, an heir to the throne, was assassinated, causing a world war which the Austrian side lost. Their empire was divied up among the victors.

But in the 18th and 19th centuries they were the richest family in the world, and it showed. Nothing was spared as far as luxury or opulence. While America was fighting our civil war they were rolling merrily along building a very fancy palace, inside a very fancy city. Now all of the world class power is gone, but what do they care? The culture of royalty remains; wide tree lined boulevards, statues on every corner, parks, fountains, roofs lined with more statues, opera, concerts, outdoor cafes on most every sidewalk.

In this atmosphere Sigmund practiced his therapy. Born in 1856 in Moravia, now a part of the Czech republic, his family moved to Vienna. They made it through one world war, but the second one wasn't so kind. His four sisters died in concentration camps, and he was forced to flee from the Nazis in 1938. After being in London for only one year, a previously diagnosed cancer flared up, and he asked his doctor to perform a Kervorkian. On September 22 and 23, 1939, he was given major doses of morphine, and he died on September 23.

Come to Vienna and you can learn all this and more! Tomorrow we leave for Budapest, with about five stops in between. We bought a new map to help with route finding, because Hungarian is not our strong point. Laundry is fresh, butts are normal again, attitudes are adjusted. Along the way we can think about one of S. Freud's famous quotes. "We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."