Freud and Frankl in Vienna and surrounds: Where the theory of dreams took root

High on a hill above Vienna, as the city drowsed in the midsummer warmth and the late 19th century loped to a close, the secret of dreams was revealed to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Slumbering at the Bellevue Hotel on the northern outskirts of the city, he was visited in a dream by a troubled patient, Irma. What meaning could this vision foretell, he wondered upon waking? As the city clattered to life below and the meadow shook off its dewdrops, Freud's famous Interpretation of Dreams took root.

The hotel on the Bellevuewiese is long gone, but a plaque commemorates the theory that originated here in 1895. The outlook offers a suitably broad perspective of this cultured, intellectual city; far below, in the Freud family's apartment at Bergrasse 19, the granular detail comes into focus. Within these rooms, Freud's theory of dreams – wish fulfillment, he concluded – was refined and transcribed for a rapt audience. Patients like Irma would routinely climb the marble staircase to the apartment and recline on the esteemed psychoanalyst's couch. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Freuds fled to London, taking their possessions with them.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you but the couch is not here," says guide Bettina Althof as she welcomes me into the apartment, now the Sigmund Freud Museum.

"We do have the floors, we do have the walls, but the furniture is not here."

This absence speaks volumes: it is both Holocaust memorial and psyche swept clean. The museum was renovated in 2020; the crisp white walls, parquet floors and extensive exhibits embody 47 years of a life lived and a work accomplished here (the fabled couch can be viewed at the Freud Museum London).

An imperceptible thread runs through the ninth district from Freud's apartment to the scalloped building in which fellow psychiatrist Viktor Frankl lived for half a century after being liberated from a concentration camp in 1945. The two men had begun corresponding when Frankl was in school; both were Jewish, both enjoyed hiking in the Viennese Alps south of the city. While Freud eluded the Nazis, Frankl was the only member of his family – bar a sister who'd escaped to Australia – to survive the camps.

Back in Vienna, amid the stately homes on Mariannengasse, Frankl developed the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (after Freud's and Alfred Adler's) and wrote his seminal book, Man's Search for Meaning. His widow Eleonore still lives here; the neighbouring apartment houses the Viktor Frankl Museum. The polished staircase leading to the entrance is reminiscent of Freud's dwelling; but where the former is largely a repository of the past, the latter is a lodestar for the future: sensory, interactive exhibits decipher Frankl's theory of logotherapy, founded on the principle that meaning is humankind's chief motivation.

"Frankl's work and tools are still so important today in how we respond to crisis," says guide Susanne Blach.