The exhibition at 19 Berggasse, where Freud lived and practiced from 1891 to 1938 in the Austrian capital, actually centers on a missing piece. The famous original couch with its oriental cover, where patients could lie down and give way to their unconscious without seeing the psychoanalyst sitting nearby, resides at the Freud Museum in London.
That is where Freud fled with his family a year before his death to escape persecution by the Nazis, after their annexation of Austria. But "objects that are missing give you more to think about than those that are present", Lydia Marinelli, director of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna told the press last week.
The couch is full of ambiguities, according to her: one can sit or lie on it and dream, but one can also experience other pleasures there.
The exhibit, entitled "The Couch: Thinking in Repose", traces the history of this piece of furniture and its role in stimulating creativity, and features a variety of reclining furniture including a piece designed by famed Secessionist architect Otto Wagner.
Artworks on the same theme by surrealists like Max Ernst, who were influenced by Freudian themes of sexuality and the unconscious, and by other artists like the Swiss Felix Vallotton are also on show.
Andy Warhol used the couch in his "factory" to compose artistic images and even directed a 1964 erotic film entitled Couch, which is screened regularly at the museum. Also part of the exhibit are treatments given to the sick until the late nineteenth century.
Some 60,000 people every year visit the museum, which was opened in 1971 in the former flat of the man known as the "father of psychoanalysis". According to Inge Scholz-Strasser, president of the private Sigmund Freud Foundation, 100,000 visitors are expected this year for Freud's 150th birthday.
The museum, however, is facing financial difficulties despite help from the city of Vienna, prompting Scholz-Strasser to wonder during a press conference "whether there was a political will in Austria regarding an Austrian known around the world".
There was indeed a love-hate relationship between Vienna, an intellectual capital but also subject to anti-Semitism, and Freud, a conservative thinker who nevertheless shocked with his revolutionary ideas.
"Do you think he would be accepted as a real Viennese today?" Freud's last surviving patient, the 88-year-old Margarether Walter, asked in an interview with the daily Der Standard, describing the doctor as "extremely friendly and calm". Even today, a square bears his name but no street has been named after Freud in Vienna.
Compared with the mass of festivities this year for the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austria is celebrating in a much more subdued fashion the anniversary of Freud's birth on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, now Pribor, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and which is now in the Czech Republic.
A symposium is, however, planned in the autumn that will combine the two in a study of "the psychoanalytic aspects of female characters" in Mozart's complex opera "Don Juan".
© 2006 Agence France-Presse