“Vienna,” Sigmund Freud wrote, a few years before the war to his German friend Wilhelm Fliess, “after all is Vienna, that is to say disgusting in the highest degree.” Freud detested the moral squalor of an age and a society whose sexuality was simultaneously overheated and hypocritical; he was appalled by the submerged vestiges of primitive savagery that his new technique of psychoanalysis was constantly uncovering in the minds of supposedly civilized twentieth-century adults.
So was Freud!
