The father of modern psychoanalysis lived in Vienna for 78 years before emigrating to London, just before the Nazis arrived in the city. Of course, Freud’s feelings about Vienna were ambivalent: although he regularly complained about his exceedingly cultivated, music-loving, cafe-crazed Viennese disciples, he never really wanted to leave.
From his plush exile in London, Freud had remarked that his liberation was “mixed with mourning, for one had still very much loved the prison from which one has been released”.
Freud himself probably would have agreed that his complicated love-hate relationship with Vienna warranted further analysis …
