Psychoanalysis went public in Salzburg. In April 1908, Sigmund Freud spoke for nearly four hours without notes at the city's Hotel Bristol, before an audience that included Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and the other founders of a movement that would reshape how the 20th century understood the mind. Salzburg was the place where psychoanalysis stopped being a Viennese private circle and became an international discipline.
The Story
The First International Psychoanalytic Congress met at Hotel Bristol in Salzburg on 27-28 April 1908. About forty-two participants gathered: analysts from Vienna, Zurich, London, and Berlin. Carl Jung had organized the event, drafted the invitations, and positioned it as a scientific congress rather than a private gathering. Freud addressed the group for close to four hours, presenting his case study of a patient with obsessional neurosis, the Rat Man, without consulting notes.
The event achieved everything it set out to do. Ernest Jones used it to plan Freud's first North American lecture tour, which took place the following year. Brill secured English translation rights. Jung became editor of the new Jahrbuch journal, placing Zurich alongside Vienna in the movement's hierarchy. The congress laid the groundwork for the International Psychoanalytic Association, formally constituted in 1910. By any measure, Salzburg 1908 is where psychoanalysis became a movement.
Three decades later, the world that had gathered in Salzburg was destroyed. The Nazi Anschluss of March 1938 forced Freud, who was Jewish, to flee Vienna. The Gestapo raided his apartment and interrogated his daughter Anna. Ernest Jones coordinated the escape: Freud left by night train from Vienna to Paris in June 1938, crossed to London, and settled in Hampstead. Four of his sisters were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. He died in London on 23 September 1939, weeks after the war he had feared finally began.
What he built in Salzburg in 1908, the organized international form of psychoanalysis, survived him. The terms he introduced there, repression, transference, the unconscious, are still part of the language we use to describe ourselves.