Comment

Many people—quite often, in fact, those whose outlook on life is particularly nationalist or xenophobic—have biographies similar to my own, shaped by culturally mixed and frequently unwelcome origins.

For some, however, the idea of never truly belonging anywhere is unbearable. Under the collective pressure to conform, they adopt the beliefs of the majority culture, constructing the sense of “we” they long for by restrictively excluding “the others” and, in a sense, persecuting in those others the parts of their own personality that they have rejected and split off.

The capacity to tolerate continuing ambivalence—or, in psychoanalytic terms, to hold the third object within one’s experience—is a cultural and psychological achievement that has nothing to do with formal education or intelligence. It is solely a question of psychological maturity or, put more simply, of integrity and an educated heart.

In Tyrol, a region at the heart of Europe through which people from widely differing places of origin have travelled on both sides of the main Alpine ridge since the end of the Ice Age, before a small proportion eventually settled there permanently, particularly strong pressures towards conformity have prevailed since the Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the period of the great migrations, and the centuries leading to the end of the Middle Ages, it was not until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the idea began to take hold that people of different sexes and ethnic origins should be accepted in their diversity—and indeed that different languages, religions, and ways of life might be regarded as an enrichment of society rather than as a threat to a patriarchally defined tribal identity.

Yet the Josephinian Enlightenment, which brought long-awaited freedoms to Jews and Protestants throughout the Habsburg Monarchy, did not penetrate every part of our country—despite, or perhaps partly because of, the flourishing of tourism from the nineteenth century onwards. Paying foreign visitors had to be presented with an untouched, pious and cheerful fairy-tale world, filled with a love of nature, delight in song, and fear of God. This idealised image existed alongside persistent violence within families, the brutal exploitation of maids and farmhands, and habitual sexual misconduct by property-owning patriarchs towards women and children.

Self-reflection—let alone an acknowledgement of responsibility for the many anti-scientific, fascist, and antisemitic wrongs of the past—is difficult to market to tourists. This is compounded by the limited interest of many foreign visitors, who often arrive on holiday with their own idealised notions of wholesome rural life. Such aspects of the past consequently fall victim to denial, concealment, and collective forgetting.

When I decided to move to Lake Achensee in 2012, to live and work here, I was well aware of the discrepancy between the magnificent natural surroundings and the friendliness of its inhabitants on the one hand, and the often considerably darker aspects of rural life on the other. After all, many of my father’s Tyrolean relatives had once fled brutality, ignorance, and alcoholism, travelling as far as New York and San Francisco.

Nevertheless, living here has also enabled me to connect with important events in the history of psychoanalysis dating back to the summer of 1900. Sigmund Freud, who had published his epoch-making work on the interpretation of dreams in Vienna in 1899, met his Berlin colleague Wilhelm Fliess on several occasions at different locations around Lake Achensee, where the two discussed—and argued about—the psychological bisexuality of human beings.

One hundred years later, in the summer of 2000, an international congress on the history of psychoanalysis was held in Pertisau in commemoration of these questions, known within psychoanalysis as the “Achensee Question”. At its heart lies the question of the psychological as well as biological dimensions of human androgyny.

It remains a deeply restorative experience for me to look out from my terrace across the lake, to feel a sense of intellectual connection with the revered old master, and, in my own modest way, to contribute to the continuing development of reason, joy in life, and self-reflection—the qualities so characteristic of psychoanalysis—in my work with patients and clients.