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On the Occasion of Freud’s 150th Birthday

Der junge Freud (Young  Dr. Freud) 

A film by Axel Corti, written by Georg Stefan Troller, Austria 1976
(In German and French with English subtitles, 98 min.)

Director Axel Corti tells the story about how Freud got to be Freud. It is a portrait of an ambitious young man, facing poverty and anti-Semitism in late 19th century Vienna, but determined to challenge his fate. Freud (Karlheinz Hackl) establishes himself in an environment that is hostile but also shapes the outlines of his later theories. ''These ideas were in the air'', he demurs when his interviewer asks if psychoanalysis would have existed without him. Neuroses haunt bourgeois Vienna like ghosts, waiting to be brought to life, and exorcised. Freud discovers the part of the human brain divided from deliberate thought, the subconscious, which he identifies as the reason for various medical dysfunctions. His method of treatment is soon put to the test with the case of Bertha Pappenheim.

September 12, 2006 @ 8:00 pm - Embassy of Austria
Admission free. RSVP required: 202-895-6776 or via e-mail