Climbing the steps to Freud’s office in Vienna, I imagined all the stories rehearsed there and wondered what gets a story right. I passed through the cloud of his clients to his door and pressed the button to ring his bell, enacting the ritual that must have become Pavlovian. The director of the museum led me to a plush couch and began explaining the book they had just published, “Freud and Travel.”
Freud made the analogy of a train journey central to psychoanalysis, inviting his patients to close their eyes and imagine they were staring out a window and that the landscapes passing by were their thoughts and memories, to simply describe what they saw as he listened. What impresses me most about him, what seems lost in the way he has been taken up by our culture, is how deeply he cared about people, that he dedicated his life to listening. He allowed people to tell him what they needed to tell, however false or mistaken, analyzing only later why and delicately.
The director said Freud’s own favorite journey was to Croatia where he loved to wade out into a lake smoking a cigar at dusk with his brother. But he added that perhaps the most telling story was when Freud visited Athens. He apologized he might be misremembering but that Freud wrote a letter describing how he had come down from the Acropolis and gotten lost in the city’s meandering alleys. Freud speculated that this was the unconscious expression of his desire to remain longer in Athens than he could. Later, when I found the letter, that was, in fact, not the story at all.
