Freud and Klimt

The last time I visited this place, there was no sign outside, and one had the feel of the residential street that Ladies of Consequence would come down to see Dr. Freud.  Now there is a huge,vertical, red sign that shouts FREUD right in front.  I guess they felt they were not helping visitors enough to find the place, but now the throbbing sign makes sure one knows where one is.  

Today we all went to visit the Freud House on 29 Berggasse in Vienna 1. 

Many of the Young Scholars noted that they had heard of Freud before, but this visit made him feel l Ike a real person to them.  They also rightly complained about the audio tour.  Now they furnish you with a little hand held radio that you hold up to your ear and listen to tidbits concerning the rooms and objects.  They commented on how it was not as interesting or engaging as a real person.  Well, yes, indeedy, I completely agree.  We we all spoiled by an excellent tour guide at the Schoenbrunn.  Debbie and I did our best to add color commentary, but I think we need to learn to are better turns rather than running over each other's commentary.  Our subversive comments do not do well in stereo.

One thing that strikes me about Dr. Freud's Talking Therapy was that he sat behind the patient where she could not see him.  They reclined on The Couch and spoke to the ceiling or the opposite door.  Not making eye contact probably enhanced the confessional effect of free association of dreams, rather like how riding in a car, where bot people are facing front, engenders greatly revelatory conversations that would not otherwise take place.  

In the afternoon, we went to see Klimt's Beethoven Frieze.  It is a wonderful voyage through the yearning of people to reach transcendence of the suffering of the world though poetry and music.  In the panel of the ills of the world, there is a beast surrounded by female personifications of death, illness, madness, lasciviousness, sloth, and intemperance. 

 The brochure referred to the beast with a masculine pronoun, and the traditional interpretation is that the beast represents the giant Typheus.  If this frieze is all about female personifications of horror, then may not the viewer see this symbolic beast to be female? Why must it be male? Grendel's Mother was a She, and if Beowulf hadn't cheated, then she would have won.  Anyway, I think it changes the frieze to think of the beast as a She.  At the end of the journey, poetry (a woman playing the lyre) leads human kind to the chorus of the Ode to Joy where the Kiss of the World is administered by a man to a woman who is almost completely obscured by the man kissing her.  It is just like his Famous painting The Kiss, only backwards.  It is faintly disturbing.  But this viewing makes me feel all rebellious and want to take the cool She Beast of the middle Frieze out to dinner as it seems like that would be much more interesting conversation than with the Pure Knight (who probably asks all the wrong questions like Parsifal) or that big lunk at the end who bends women's necks all weird when he kisses them.  

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