Sigmund Freud and Vienna 
 



                 Sigmund Freud on psychoanalysis and Vienna

    "The suggestion is that psycho-analysis, and in particular its
    assertion that the neuroses are traceable to disturbances in sexual
    life, could only have originated in a town like Vienna - in an
    atmosphere of sensuality and immorality foreign to other cities - and
    that it is simply a reflection, a projection into theory, as it were,
    of these peculiar Viennese conditions.

    Now I am certainly no local patriot; but this theory about
    psycho-analysis always seems to me quite exceptionally senseless - so
    senseless, in fact, that I have sometimes been inclined to suppose that
    the reproach of being a citizen of Vienna is only a euphemistic
    substitute for another reproach which no one would care to put forward
    openly.

If the premises on which the argument rests were the opposite of what they
are, then it might be worth giving it a hearing. If there were a town in
which the inhabitants imposed exceptional restrictions on themselves as
regards sexual satisfaction, and if at the same time they exhibited a marked
tendency to severe neurotic disorders, that town might certainly give rise
in an observer's mind to the idea that the two circumstances had some
connection with each other, and might suggest that one was contingent on the
other. But neither of these assumptions is true of Vienna.

The Viennese are no more abstinent and no more neurotic than the inhabitants
of any other capital city. There is rather less embarrassment - less prudery
- in regard to sexual relationships than in the cities of the West and North
which are so proud of their chastity. These peculiar characteristics of
Vienna would be more likely to mislead the observer on the causation of
neurosis than to enlighten him on it.

Vienna has done everything possible, however, to deny her share in the
origin of psycho-analysis. In no other place is the hostile indifference of
the learned and educated section of the population so evident to the analyst
as in Vienna."
(Sigmund Freud - On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement)

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