VIENNA, Austria – A psychiatrist instructs a patient on his couch: “I’ll say a normal word, then you say the first sick thing that pops into your head.” Another phones his wife to say: “I’m going to be late, dear. It’s total craziness here.”
An irreverent collection of cartoons from The New Yorker magazine that poke unabashed fun at psychotherapy go on display Friday in Vienna, and the setting couldn’t be more appropriate: the house where Sigmund Freud founded the profession.
“I think he’d enjoy them,” curator Michael Freund said. “I’m not so sure he’d appreciate the Freud-bashing. But by now he’d be too old to care.”
“On the Couch: Cartoons From The New Yorker” features more than 80 drawings lampooning the hand-wringing over human angst. The exhibition runs through June 24 at Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum, located in the Berggasse apartment where the good doctor first hung out a shingle and began treating patients.
“Bringing the cartoons to this special location makes them all the more interesting,” said Inge Scholz-Strasser, the museum’s director, describing the works as “imaginative, reflective and often extraordinarily comical.”
Mental illness is no laughing matter, and Freud, who died in 1939, certainly took his psychoanalysis seriously. But the bearded, bespectacled icon – whose 150th birthday anniversary was celebrated worldwide last year – wasn’t blind to the therapeutic value of humor.
His 1905 book, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” was as much a collection of unusual jokes as it was a scientific inquiry into the fundamental nature of humor.
In it, Freud mused about the power of jokes “to arouse a feeling of pleasure” and concluded that poking fun at the human experience can be “a rebellion against authority, a liberation from the oppression it imposes.”
Since the 1940s, when Freudianism first began prompting generations of people around the world to seek out a psychotherapist, a dream analyst or a self-help book, it has become fair game for artists and standup comics.
Today, “the couch, the bearded analyst and the infantilized patient belong – like the lonely desert island or the Loch Ness Monster – to the standard repertoire of cartoonists,” the “On the Couch” organizers concede.
The one thing that is not repressed at this exhibition is laughter.
Among the cartoons on display in the musty rooms where Freud once lived and practiced are works by beloved artists and regular New Yorker contributors such as William Steig, Victoria Roberts, Whitney Darrow Jr., J.C. Duffy and B.E. Kaplan. They poke playful fun at bizarre childhood memories, the high price of therapy and the ubiquitous couch.
“Offhand, Mrs. Wheelwright, I’d say you’re nutty as a fruitcake,” one therapist opines to his startled patient.
“This one allows release of your information to a sitcom,” a psychiatrist says, handing a form on a clipboard to his client.
Another, bent over a laptop, tells a man on a couch: “Oops! I just deleted all your files. Can you repeat everything you’ve ever told me?”
Stiff bills for treatment are a recurrent theme. “Would it be possible to speak with the personality that pays the bills?” one therapist asks his patient. Another advises: “Ask yourself this – if, as you say, you are a total failure, how could you possibly afford me?”
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