A photo
Freud, I think, would have been amused by the photo I took outside his house this summer. Across the road from the Viennese apartment where Freud worked and lived is now a 2nd hand shop and in the window of this shop is a display of Barbie Dolls. My photo captures the facade of the Freud Museum reflected above a crowd of used Barbie Dolls.
It's not hard to imagine what Freud might have thought about Barbie. With her impossibly exaggerated proportions, the Barbie Doll represents an intrusion (extrusion?) of adult sexuality into childhood consciousness. Freud claimed that sexuality in various forms is an inherent part of childhood anyway, but I suspect he might have had a lot to say about the way consumer marketing has used the Barbie Doll to exploit the uncertainties of an emerging childhood identity. What I’d be interested to hear is Freud’s thoughts about the focus of this marketing – is Barbie more marketed to children or their parents? Is the attraction of Barbie’s exaggerated proportions grounded more in the insecurities of the children who ask for the doll or the parents who give it to them? Adding layer to layer, what does a 2nd hand Barbie represent (does she feel used?) and why have so many been placed in a shop-front in this affluent Viennese suburb? With my interest piqued, I decided to go inside and explore.
Entering any shop is a little like walking into someone’s mind. What is placed where says something about the priorities and values of the shopkeeper and the kind of relationship they might be hoping to build with you. Like the eye-shadow and red lipstick of a prospective lover, a shop is arranged to attract and entice. But a 2nd hand shop is a little different. None of the fresh, smooth polish of a fashion outlet here; instead there is a kind of aging lack of pretence. A 2nd hand shop represents a version of a vision of what has lasting value – what has enough residual utility to be offered up for a second term in the market without polish or pretence.
Inevitably my browsing was turning from something passive to a more active process of cultural archaeology: an attempt to explore the layers, trying to find the underlying maps that could help me navigate a culture that 100 years ago had produced Freud and now produced a display of barbie dolls looking back at him.
On one wall, cheap paintings with splashes of fast colour; on another, a shelf of mugs with sayings for the office; in a corner, a rack of suits now perhaps fashionably out-of-date; a back room with bookshelves filled with books in German, tantalisingly indecipherable.
What struck me most was how familiar everything seemed. Language aside, this shop was fundamentally familiar. Add a few wetsuits and board shorts and I could be at home in Melbourne. The sense of an ordered chaos - a mass of mostly related objects piled up more for utility than for appearance - was just like any similar shop in any number of cities around the world.
Except for the Barbie Dolls. And here I was left with a conundrum and a sense of hope. My hope is that the Barbies were placed deliberately to be ironic. Sitting looking as they do at Freud's home, they made me wonder if they might just be a humorous challenge: "look at me Freud" they seemed to say, "can you imagine, from your conservative pre-war world, that children might end up with toys that look like us?"
And Freud, I think, would have smiled. Sitting in his upstairs living room contemplating the extortionate "emigration tax" required by the nazis as a bribe to escape the impending holocaust, Freud no doubt saw a dark future for his city.
But Freud, too, was a master of irony. A final condition of leaving Austria was that he sign a document attesting to his good treatment by the German Reich. It read:
"I Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom, that I could continue to pursue my activities in every way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest reason for any complaint."Ernest Jones writes that, 'When the Nazi Commissar brought it along Freud had of course no compunction in signing it, but he asked if he might be allowed to add a sentence, which was: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone".' 1.
From a world wiped of humour and humanity by the scourge of Nazism, I think Freud would have taken a little delight in the idea of this gaggle of Barbie Dolls looking across the street. I have spent the last few months trying to decipher what they mean and I still don't know; there's a lot not to like about Barbie, but in this display in modern Vienna, I couldn't help but see a little humour and hope.
1.Ernest Jones: Sigmund Freud. Life and work. (1957)
