Conclusion

             Sociologists R. Park and L. Wirth both felt that “urban life brought with it mental instability, loneliness, and alienation, as well as an increase in pathological behavior.” (See Poon)  Considering the state of Vienna in the fin-de-siecle period, it is difficult to imagine a place more likely to produce “pathological behavior.”  It is little wonder that a genius who was forced to overcome as much personal, professional and political adversity as Sigmund Freud, would not excel in a city going through just as much adversity.  Just as Vienna was torn between the modern and the medieval, democracy and monarchy, liberalism and fascism, equality and hierarchy, imperialism and isolation, so is the human mind torn between conflicting emotions.  Only in an environment, so confused and struggling for an identity as fin-de-Siecle Vienna, could one succeed in trying to analyze something which may never be fully understood, the human mind.  Only then and there could Sigmund Freud have developed psychoanalysis. 

Link to Sigmund Freud Museum Homepage