PSY | Following in the footsteps of Viennese Psychology: ZHAW Students visit SFU Vienna

The Palais Epstein as a meeting point and the Viennese school reform

The meeting point for the guided tour was the Palais Epstein on Karl Renner-Ring. During the interwar period, the building, which housed the City School Board – the educational headquarters of the Vienna school reform – was also home to the Vienna Psychological Institute, headed by Karl and Charlotte Bühler.

Standing in front of the commemorative plaque for Karl and Charlotte Bühler, unveiled in 1995, Dean Benetka explained the history of the Institute’s founding, which was closely linked to the education policy of ‘Red Vienna’.

Passing the Monument to the Republic and the Parliament, the Swiss students were given an overview of the history of Vienna’s Ringstrasse – the section leading from the Parliament to City Hall, the Burgtheater and the University is an architectural expression of the self-assured heyday of liberalism.

Palais Lieben-Auspitz, Freud and Franz Brentano

The Palais Lieben-Auspitz, which houses Café Landtmann, was the second stop on the tour. The banker Leopold von Lieben, who was married to Baroness Anna Freiin von Todesco, lived on the first floor.

Anna von Lieben was a patient of Sigmund Freud in 1887–1888 and again in 1893; in his *Studies on Hysteria*, published in 1895, she is referred to under the pseudonym Cäcilie M. Freud described his patient as a ‘teacher’, thereby highlighting just how much the discovery of psychoanalysis owed to his early female patients in particular.

The Baroness’s therapy brought Freud into contact with Franz Brentano, who had been married to Ida von Lieben, the sister of Leopold von Lieben, and lived on the third floor of the Palais Lieben-Auspitz.

Brentano, who as a Catholic priest and philosopher had drafted a statement opposing the dogma of infallibility proclaimed by the First Vatican Council, and had resigned from the priesthood three years later, had been appointed to a chair of philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1874, against the opposition of clerical-conservative circles. In the same year, his *Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint* was published.

Alongside Freud, the audience at his lectures in Vienna included Christian von Ehrenfels (who introduced the concept of ‘Gestalt quality’ into the specialist literature), Alexius Meinong (founder of the first experimental psychology laboratory at an Austrian university in Graz), Franz Hillebrand (founder of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Innsbruck) and the man who would later become the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš G. Masaryk, and, above all, Edmund Husserl, to whom the philosophical school of phenomenology—which has remained influential throughout the 20th century and to this day—is attributed.

As a former priest, Brentano feared that the Catholic Church might object to his marriage; consequently, before his wedding, he renounced his Austrian citizenship – and with it his professorship at the University of Vienna – in order to marry Ida von Lieben in Leipzig as a citizen of Saxony. Following the couple’s return to Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph subsequently refused to sign Brentano’s reinstatement as a professor.

For 14 years, Brentano taught at the university as a private lecturer; following his wife’s death, he left Austria in 1895. In the *Neue Freie Presse*, he published a three-part series of articles under the heading ‘My Final Wishes for Austria’. The three wishes were:

1. more gratitude;
2. a reform of marriage law;
3. the establishment of a Psychological Institute at the University of Vienna (which, as explained at the start of the tour, was not achieved until 1922 under Karl Bühler).

Brentano went to Florence; after Italy entered the war, he moved to Switzerland in 1915 and eventually died in Zurich on 17 March 1917.

Karl von Motesiczky, Wilhelm Reich and the Resistance

Another tragic story is linked to the Lieben-Auspitz family.

Anna von Lieben’s grandson, Karl von Motesiczky, a close friend and patron of Heimito von Doderer, met Wilhelm Reich in Berlin in the early 1930s and became his patient and student. In 1933, he followed his teacher into exile first to Denmark and then to Norway, where he was one of Reich’s closest collaborators in his Sexpol work.

At the turn of the year 1937/38, Motesiczky returned to Vienna; following the so-called Anschluss, he, together with Ella and Kurt Lingens, belonged to a political resistance group that helped persecuted Jews to flee Austria.

In the early 1940s, he trained as a psychoanalyst within the institutional framework of the Vienna working group of the Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy – which was based in Berlin and headed by a cousin of Hermann Göring – under August Aichhorn.

In 1942, Motesiczky and Ella Lingens were arrested following a denunciation and deported to Auschwitz. Motesiczky was murdered in 1943; Ella Lingens, the mother of the well-known Austrian journalist and long-standing editor of the weekly magazine *Profil*, Peter Michael Lingens, survived Auschwitz as a prisoner doctor.

Berta Zuckerkandl’s Salon

Another point worth mentioning in connection with the Palais Lieben-Auspitz is that, from 1917 onwards, the writer Berta Zuckerkandl – who was married to the professor of anatomy Emil Zuckerkandl – ran her salon on the fourth floor, which was known throughout the city, where, every Sunday, leading figures from the worlds of politics, science and the arts would gather.

Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle

The third stop was the bust of Ernst Mach, the leading figure of the Vienna Circle, unveiled on 12 June 1926 in the Rathauspark next to the University; the philosophy professor Moritz Schlick, who was later murdered on the Philosophenstiege at the University, had delivered the commemorative address on this occasion.

Ernst Mach, born in 1834 near Brno in Moravia, had studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and, following his doctorate (1860) and habilitation (1861), he was appointed to the University of Graz in 1864, initially as Professor of Mathematics and, from 1866, as Professor of Physics.

In the winter semester of 1867–68, he was appointed to the University of Prague; in 1895, he was appointed to a full professorship in philosophy at the University of Vienna, specialising in the history of inductive sciences (Mach had actually wanted his professorship to be dedicated to psychology).

Mach suffered a stroke in 1898; in 1901 he resigned from his professorship. He died in Munich in 1916.

Mach’s chair was initially taken over by Ludwig Boltzmann; following Boltzmann’s suicide in Duino, it remained vacant for several years until Adolf Stöhr was appointed in 1910. Following Stöhr’s death in 1921, Karl Bühler was appointed as his successor in the autumn of the following year.

Mach’s significance for psychology

Mach is regarded as a pioneer of logical positivism; it is no coincidence that the Vienna Circle’s popularisation society called itself the ‘Ernst Mach Society’.

His significance for the history of psychology can hardly be overestimated. In his book, first published in 1886 under the title *Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations*, Mach posits that the external and internal worlds consist of a finite number of homogeneous elements (‘sensations’).

These elements are combined into more fleeting or, at times, more stable connections, which are understood as physical bodies, our own body, and also as psychological complexes. Whether an element is understood as psychological or physical depends on the relationship in which it is placed in relation to other elements.

A ‘colour’ is a physical object when we consider it in terms of its dependence, for example, on the illuminating light source, and a psychological object when we consider it in relation to ‘bodily’ or, rather, physiological processes.

The focus of psychological inquiry therefore lies in examining psychological complexes in their functional relationship to physiological processes. The crux of this approach lies in the fact that physics and psychology deal with one and the same reality. It is not the subject matter, but the line of inquiry that differs between the two fields.

The Arcaded Courtyard of the University of Vienna

The fourth stop was a guided tour of the University’s Arkadenhof. The new university on the Ring opened in 1884; the first monument was erected in the courtyard in 1888.

By 2002, the ‘sculptural representation of university scholarship’ (as described in the university’s own statement) had grown to more than 150 exhibits. The only woman to have been included up to that point was not a scientist: the writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.

In 2016, seven monuments to women were finally erected, including those to Charlotte Bühler and Marie Jahoda – two female academics who had worked at the Vienna Institute of Psychology during the interwar period.

These were also the last additions to the collection: at the end of June 2024, the Senate passed a resolution to cease erecting any further monuments.

Liebiggasse 5 and the Freud Stele

The walk then continued behind the university, past the building at Liebiggasse 5, which had housed the Vienna Psychological Institute since 1934.

From there, the walk continued to Sigmund Freud Park, where Dean Benetka recalled the many blunders that occurred during the unveiling of the Freud stele in 1985: the incorrect quotation (mistakenly ‘The voice of reason is soft’ instead of ‘The voice of the intellect is soft’; the reference to the wrong book from which the incorrect quotation was supposed to come: from *Civilisation and Its Discontents* instead of *The Future of an Illusion*); and finally, the fact that the now-corrected quotation actually suggests the very opposite of what Freud intended to say in the passage in question: that whilst the voice of the intellect may be soft, it will, in time and against all odds, make itself heard).

Hotel Regina, the Freud Museum and the Black Forest School

Behind the Votiv Church lies the Hotel Regina, where Freud’s visitors (such as Sándor Ferenczi) were accommodated and where the Bühler couple held their post-colloquium every other Wednesday with students and guests of the Psychological Institute.

From the Hotel Regina, the route took us down Berggasse to the Freud Museum, from there across Schlick-Platz to the Ring and back up to the university, to show the students the Café Central and the building which, during the interwar period, housed the famous Café Herrenhof.

The Schwarzwald School had been housed on the upper floor of the rear section of the building, with its entrance at Wallnerstraße 9, since 1913. Eugenie Schwarzwald had studied German language and literature at the University of Zurich from 1895 to 1900 (at that time, the University of Zurich was the only higher education institution in the German-speaking world that admitted women as students).

From October 1901, ‘Frau Doktor’, as she was known (though initially not yet officially under her own name), ran a girls’ secondary school on Franziskanerplatz, which was granted public status in 1905 and was gradually expanded into an educational centre (comprising a co-educational primary school, a girls’ secondary school and further education courses).

The girls’ secondary school had been in existence since 1911; it was the first secondary school in Austria at which girls could take their school-leaving examinations.

Teachers at the school included Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg, Egon Wellesz and Hans Kelsen (who drafted the Austrian constitution and taught sociology at the Schwarzwald School).

Among the female pupils who went on to become famous were the Freud daughters Sophie and Anna Freud, the pioneer of art therapy Edith Kramer, the actresses Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel and Helene Weigel, the writer (and Bühler pupil) Hilde Spiel, the psychiatrist, neurologist and psychoanalyst Else Pappenheim, and many others besides.

The Centre for Business Psychology Research and Marienthal

The Austrian Centre for Business Psychology Research was founded in 1931 at Wallnerstraße 8, the Palais Geymüller.

Working closely with the Vienna Psychological Institute, the research centre, under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld and later Marie Jahoda, carried out commissioned research (primarily market research) for private companies. The proceeds from this were used to fund empirical studies relevant to social psychology (e.g. on the psychology of adult education centre attendees or on the programme preferences of radio listeners).

The best-known study to emerge from the Centre is *The Unemployed of Marienthal* (1933) – an investigation into the psychological and social effects of long-term unemployment.