Freud's Vienna: The Three Schools of Psychoanalysis

Itinerary

• Day 1 - Flights to Vienna

  We shall fly to Vienna and transfer to the 4* Hotel Kaiserhof. This evening our guest lecturer will give a talk on the Viennese School at the Alfred Adler Center International, in the district where Adler, a member of Freud’s Psychological Wednesday Society, was born and lived.

• Day 2 - Exploring Vienna

  Today is devoted to exploring the Jewish history of the city. Until 1938, Vienna had one of the most important Jewish communities in the world, numbering almost 200,000 at the peak, and including many prominent scientists and thinkers. We start with a walking tour in the mediaeval old town, before visiting the Jewish Museum at Palais Eskeles in Dorotheergasse, the subterranean remains of a medieval synagogue and the Holocaust Memorial at Judenplatz. The afternoon we will visit the Central Cemetery, one of the largest in the world and resting place of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. It is also home to two Jewish sections, where a number of Rothschilds other notables are buried.

• Day 3 - Freud Museum

  This morning we will begin with a second walking tour, which follows in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud’s life in Vienna. We start at the famous Café Landtmann, a meeting point for many of the great thinkers, artists and politicians of Belle Epoque Vienna, and a favourite of not only Freud, but also Gustav Mahler, Peter Altenberg, Felix Salten, and Emmerich Kálmán. We finish at the Freud Museum, housed in the building where he worked for 47 years. After lunch there will be a visit to the Viktor Frankl Museum, devoted to the psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, the third school of Viennese psychotherapy.

• Day 4 - Josephinum Medical Museum

  The Narrenturm (Fool’s Tower) is Europe’s oldest building for the accommodation of psychiatric patients. Built in 1784, it is next to the site of the old Vienna General Hospital, and is now home to a fascinating exhibition of pathology and anatomy, reopened in 2020. After the visit here we will continue to the Josephinum Medical Museum, part of the Medical University of Vienna. As well as exhibits on the development of medical teaching, ophthalmology, hygiene, brain function, surgery and pathology, the Josephinum has the second largest collection of wax anatomical models in the world. Still protected in their original rosewood and venetian glass displays from the late 1700s, the 1,192 models of dismembered body parts and whole figures were created in wax-artists workshop in Florence, before being painstakingly transported over the alps by pack mule.

• Day 5 - Return to Uk

  After breakfast we will depart for the return transfer to Vienna airport.