Remains of Memory, Disturbances in Reading

From the Sigmund Freud Museum Collection

July 17, 2010 to 2011

“Remains of Memory, Disturbances in Reading – From the Sigmund Freud Museum Collection” takes visitors into the archive and the library of the Sigmund Freud Museum. Pictures, writings and objects, which until now have been stored away out of sight, are on display for the first time, providing an overview of collecting activity at the institution housed in the rooms where Sigmund Freud lived and worked.
The presentation was curated by Lydia Marinelli and adds material from the archive at Berggasse 19, which is compounding around 50,000 pieces.
 
“Remains of Memory, Disturbances in Reading” serves to provide visitors with a view into the museum’s “back stage”. In this way it closes gaps in the permanent exhibition, but simultaneously it makes them visible anew. Additionally, it also poses fundamental questions regarding the archivability of knowledge and the Freudian perspective on collecting, reading, and documenting. On the one hand, Freud had little faith in archives: in his psychoanalytic theory they are frequently described as sites of censorship.
First editions and corrected manuscripts from Sigmund Freud are shown alongside works from psychoanalysts such as Richard Sterba, whose emigration to the USA forced him to discontinue work on his Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Many private photos and writings from Anna Freud, who also lived at Berggasse 19 and conducted analyses there, are on view as well.

Under the title “Papers, Corrections”, the exhibition features a section illustrating Sigmund Freud’s handling of his own manuscripts and shedding light on the work of Richard Sterba, whose papers were acquired by the Sigmund Freud Foundation. The Sigmund Freud Foundation owns a typescript of the book Moses and Monotheism with Freud’s handwritten corrections as well as a copy of the first edition with a signed dedication to his colleague Paul Federn.
      
In his Dictionary of Psychoanalysis Richard Sterba (1898-1989) compiled the first encyclopedia of the science. In 1936 and 1937 the dictionary appeared in five installments, from A for abasia to G for Größenwahn (megalomania). Although Sterba had worked on entries up to the letter K, it was not possible to publish them under the National Socialist regime. Sterba, together with most of his Jewish colleagues, decided to go into exile in the USA. The dictionary remained fragmentary.
      
The Sigmund Freud Museum library developed around a gift made by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter. She left a part of her library to the museum and started an international effort encouraging psychoanalysts to donate books as well. The materials that she donated to the museum were made up of items from the Hampstead Nursery, of which she had been the founder, from the collection of Albert Storfer, the former director of the International Psychoanalytic Press who had fled to Shanghai and with whom she had cooperated, and from her own private collection of books. The volumes assembled in her former office, where she began her psychoanalytic practice in the 1920s, form a collage on the intellectual biography of Anna Freud.

Another section of the exhibition shows the papers and collections of Margarethe Trautenegg, née Csonka. Many of the images in the archive are private photographs that reflect the biographical experiences of their former owners. Trautenegg was sent to Freud on account of her homosexual inclinations. His discussion of her in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920) displays a remarkably liberal attitude. Her emigration took her to several countries, including Cuba.

The exhibition also features numerous items from the papers and collections of Eva Rosenfeld (1892-1977), which the Sigmund Freud Foundation acquired in 2002. This is the largest intellectual estate in the collection, and its acquisition was funded by the City of Vienna and the Austrian Federal Government. Eva Rosenfeld was a close friend of Anna Freud, and together with her and Dorothy Burlingham she founded the Hietzing School. The exhibition section devoted to Rosenfeld includes letters and signed Anna Freud originals and also a note from Marlene Dietrich.
          
Remains of Memory, Disturbances in Reading – From the Sigmund Freud Museum Collection
July 17, 2010 to 2011
Daily 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
July 1 – September 30, 9 – 6
Berggasse 19, Vienna 1090
www.freud-museum.at


drawing by Richard Sterba
Margarethe Trautenegg in Havanna
Note by Marlene Dietrich