May 7-8. Prague, Pribor, Hotel Troyer, Vienna

Tuesday and Wednesday, May 7-8. From Prague to Pribor (Freud’s birthplace) to Hotel Troyer (in Pribor area) to Vienna. 

Dear Trail Friends,

I am beginning this blog Wednesday morning on the bus to Vienna. We are driving through green and open spaces, rolling hills, green and yellow fields, large wooded areas. It was striking yesterday to leave Prague and drive into the fresh, green and open expanses of the countryside. (My lungs and throat are very thankful to have had this respite from the diesel fumes from urban traffic.)

I love this opportunity to contemplate Freud’s move at age 3 from the village/rural world (imagined at least retrospectively as a kind of paradise) of Pribor to the urban world of Vienna, and to think of this transition as archetypal in the human story both in individual lives and in the life of the species. It is interesting to reflect on this in my personal story and to consider its role in shaping Freud’s psyche and his discoveries and ideas about the human psyche that have so influenced how we explain our mysterious selves to ourselves and one another. 

I was 5 years old when my family moved from Milwaukee to San Diego, and felt keenly the loss of the familiar sense of neighborhood and place. I remember how anxiously I awaited the moving van with our furniture and how profoundly disappointed I was when it’s arrival failed to restore my lost sense of home (or the imagined lost paradise I called home). But my family first moved to a small village on the top of a mountain called La Cresta. My parents got me a puppy to help heal my sense of loss, and my dog Rab and I spent hours exploring the natural world around us. I found a sense of shelter and safety and belonging in that world and it has remained throughout my life the place where I feel most at peace and at home. 

When the family moved down from La Cresta into San Diego, I discovered the crayons that riddle the city. They were secret worlds of nature and wildness in the midst of the city. One had only to hike down into the canyon and the sound and smell of cars disappeared. There with the rabbits, lizards, horned roads, snakes, and the rich wild herbal scents of the chaparral, I once again was at home. I suspect that Freud would tell me - I can hear my imaginary Freud telling me - that this sense of home is a narcissistic fantasy, a wish fulfillment, an illusion of return and reunion with the lost mother of infancy. 

This makes me think of Wendell Barry and his beautiful prose accounts, so full of tender appreciation for a lost agrarian way of life in which people find physical engagement with place and community through the long lovely labor of cultivating, weaving together, their interdependent life with farmland and animals and neighbors. Sometimes I find myself standing back from his nostalgia and thinking of the way of life of native Americans that was destroyed to make way for the agrarian settlers. 

The human story is one lost paradise after another, isn’t it? Often Chris and I, faced with the rapidity of technological and social change and the disturbing political consequences, think how lucky we have been to live in the disappearing paradise of our times and feel sad on behalf of the generations who follow us. 

As I strolled around Vienna before our bus left, saying goodbye to the ornate older buildings, I snapped a photo of a sculptural detail on a building that seemed to be bending down and gazing at the work in progress in the street below. (Photo 1)

I think I will use this photo to symbolize a personification the the lost paradise leaning down to gaze, with a sense of blessing and wonder, on the paradise under construction. I find it far more consoling than, for example, the David Cerny sculpture of the babies, with high tech connectors instead of faces, crawling up a tower toward the sky. (Photo 2, from Wikipedia commons)   

 From a distance, when you can’t see their lack of faces, the babies look adorable enough. 

But they symbolize for me the loss of human connection (when eyes meet eyes, when faces meet faces, both expressing and reflecting emotion) and its replacement with technical connection. 

This makes me aware and grateful for faces and facial communication. Photo 3 is a collage  of our group at our rest stop on the bus trip to Pribor yesterday. And photo 4 is Chris’s face as she sleeps right now on the bus beside me. 

Our actual visit to Pribor was an interesting mix of disappointed expectations and surprise pleasures. I had expected (I didn’t know this until I was disappointed) the little museum at the house where Freud was born to have made an effort to recreate and display the particular spaces his family lived in and how they might have furnished and lived in those spaces. Instead both downstairs ( which Chris said was a blacksmith shop at the time) and upstairs  (which Chris had said was two units rented out to two different families) were filled with displays about Freud and his ideas that - from my perspective - could have been anywhere. 

When we first arrived at the village square, before going to the Freud house, we approached various cafes (after wandering a long way to find one that turned out to be closed). We found that a smoke-filled pub and a small cafe that  accepted only Czech koruny (while we only had euros and credit cards). We learned from our tour guide that the travel agency had been unable to find a restaurant in the small village willing to prepare lunch for our group of 29 - so they had hoped we could disperse and find lunch in our own among several small restaurants. No such luck. 

At last we found a Vietnamese restaurant on the square where most of our tour mates had congregated. (Ben tells me that Beth, Mike and Chris went into the Irish pub and had beer for lunch, which evidently satisfied them.) We gradually realized that the Vietnamese restaurant was a one-man operation. Service might have seemed slow to us, but this one-man waiter-dishwasher-chef, who spoke almost no English, was whirling around feeding (with no preparation) essentially the entire group that no one had been willing to take on. We also learned that the trophies behind the counter represented his victories all over the world - places like China, Guatemala, 

Etc. When I asked him to pose in front of his trophies and he held up two fingers of each hand to form the “V” for victory, our whole group applauded him. (Photo 5). The woman who had been at the counter and brought us water (who also spoke little or no English, and who as we learned later actually worked at the bakery a few buildings away and had come to help him out) smiled and said “Chanpion.”

When we arrived finally at Freud’s birthplace I was surprised by the fun we had with the couch sculpture in front of the house. We took turns posing on the couch and Chris playfully posed as an analyst looking the other way, outside the patient’s view. Photo 6 is a collage of these plus a figure of Freud. I am imagining Chris looking up affectionately at the man she often calls her intellectual father. 

We stayed at Hotel Troyer in the countryside not far from Pribor and I found myself profoundly refreshed by walking up and down the mountain through trees beside a stream (photos 7 and 8). 

Judy was too tired to draw and I to blog Wednesday. I think many on the tour find the bus rides tiring. I know I also am challenged

by the need to adapt to change and uncertainty and circumstances that don’t match my expectations. 

I have returned to this writing in the middle of Thursday night (actually early Friday morning). Thursday was for me a long and exhausting day. I wish you could have heard Chris’s first Vienna lecture for yourself. There was a good deal of storytelling magic interwoven with passion for ideas as she recounted her personal intellectual history and how she discovered Jung as a young mother searching the psychology shelf in a local library (Modern Man in Search If a Soul - that was so long ago, she said, that I wasn’t bothered by the use of the word ‘man’) then Buber, then Freud. I alas was so deeply exhausted by the bus ride (and a stop in which the restaurants refused to service us - even the one the driver had called ahead to alert that we were coming - and there was much confusion and delay and a little irritation when some tour mates were 30 minutes late - they had found a restaurant at last and assumed we all met similar delays, while the rest of us had settled for snacks and lunches from a gas station. My own and others irritability alarmed me (probably set off the old child of divorce family breakup alarm, since this group has been so warm and kind to me and each other it is in danger of becoming a lost paradise at any moment!)

Another thing that exhausted me was our drawing session. I tried to draw a version of the hanging Freud sculpture and when I chose to color the skin green it stirred up enormous unexpected sadness. Freud looked so alone dangling there at the top of a city building. I felt the need to draw some green branches reaching out to him so he would be comforted not be so all alone. I found lyrics from Mary Magdalene’s song in Jesus Christ Superstar coming into my mind, words like “I don’t know how to love him” and “He’s just a man.”

Freud and I joked during my analysis at my tendency to project Jesus Christ into my Jewish atheist analyst, but as I was drawing I found myself wondering who Freud really is, and who he is to me. Does he represent a part of myself as well? Maybe the Uber-Ich (over-I) that civilized self dangling up high above the urban world looking down on the I and trying to help her navigate the choices posed by her impossibly contradictory longings and drives. Anyway here is the drawing (photo 9)

I was happy when I saw Judy’s drawing (photo 10) of the view from the window at the house where Freud was born. I liked that there was a tower in the window (a cupola? Is that the word?) that might have been, or resembled, the Catholic Church (I took a photo - photo 11 - from the square of a similar tower I thought might be the church). I remembered stories of Freud being taken to church by his Catholic nurse (who was fired for stealing and that sudden rupture I’d rekationship may have been one of Freud’s earliest experiences of a loss paradise). Freud and I have discussed at length my own ambivalent relationship with the Catholic Church and I like having that as a presence there. 

There is so much more I would like to write but it is now nearly 4am and tomorrow, my friend, we will be following the trail of Freud’s life in Vienna, walking streets he walked and visiting places he lived and visited. I am very grateful for the specialtime for  reflection  that this blog ( and your companionship in imagination) make possible but I am also finding this trip emotionally and intellectually challenging and exhausting. I will end with two photos. I left dinner early last night, skipping dessert, so grateful to make the short walk back to our hotel alone. The church (Saint Stephan) was beautifully lit up (photo 12). Then in the elevator I noticed the mirrors - like in a department store dressing room or in the Freud museum and the infinite reflections of self. It made me think of Chris talking about the word for theory coming from a Greek word for seeing and how the theories of all these men - Jung, Buber, Freud provides different ways of seeing life and herself and relationships. I also thought that the mirrors multiplied and reflected my utter exhaustion. This poor aging brain of mine just can’t take in and digest all the rich food for thought I am offered on this tour. 

So, it’s time to go back to bed. You are probably as exhausted as I am if you have read this far. Thank you so much for your persistence, and I will see you on the trail tomorrow.