Laura likes Coke©; Freud Really Liked Coke

Vienna, Austria is famous for many things…The Habsburgs, Mozart, churches that take up entire city blocks, and Sigmund Freud. Being the rather morbid person that I am, only one of those things truly caught my attention. And so I was off to the Freud museum.

Anyone that is not a psychology major should know that there are really only two reasons to visit a museum devoted completely to Sigmund Freud. And none of them revolve around the id, the ego, or the superego. Well, not exactly.

Freud loved coke. And by coke I do not mean: “I’d like to buy the world…,” “The pause that refreshes, “Good til’ the last drop,” “Pure as Sunlight,” “The real thing.” Well, maybe I do, but not in the same sense.

To the good doctor, cocaine was that cure-all drug for any psychological illness—well, really any illness—that was in no way meant for thugs. And with side effects like: addiction, paranoia, irritability, restlessness, auditory hallucinations, and mood disturbances, this writer does not know how any person could disagree. This was the first question I wanted answered after paying four-euro to step inside the museum.

The second question revolved around Freud’s stages of psychosexual development—which makes a lot more sense once a person realizes the man spent the better part of his adult life literally hopped up on uppers. According to Freud, a person cannot develop a healthy personality unless he or she accepts his or her libido as the driving force for all desires. A concept made stranger when understood that this healthy personality should be developed by the age of five.

Any common tourist would expect to read about these things when walking into a Freud museum. Sadly, no. Less than two pages each of the sixty-page guides given to visitors are devoted to the only things most people know about Freud. Reading about his wife, his family, and his education are all great fun, but honestly, all real quests for knowledge are rooted in a desire for scandal—any Freudian scholar would know that—and the Freud museum offered very little.