ABSTRACT
In may of 1938, on the eve of Sigmund Freud’s expulsion from Vienna and flight to London, Freud’s colleague August Aichhorn met with the photojournalist Edmund Engelman at the Cafe Museum on the Karlsplatz in Vienna to make a proposal. This chapter explores the role of vision in three-dimensional space, examining how architecture organizes the physical and visual interaction of bodies as they move through the interior of Freud’s professional office. Architecture and psychoanalysis come together in a reading of the interior, for both are cultural discourses of the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible—of public and private space. The photographs of Berggasse 19, originally taken for the postwar construction of a Freud museum, have themselves become the museum—miniature sites of preservation and display. Freud displayed in the close space of his office the entirety of his collection, acquired mainly from local antique dealers with earnings set aside from his daily hour of open consultations.
