Freud, Medicine, and Opera

08/16/06

Today we had a lecture on Freud and went to the Freud museum. An ironic an interesting connection to the Freud discussion today we had sitting around last night. We were discussing all the art that we had seen and the prevalence of naked women in art. We were debating whether the reason we thought naked women were more beautiful than men was a social construct or whether women’s bodies were inherently more beautiful. There was a general consensus that as much as we might like men, penises look funny and are not beautiful. We would never want one. This made us laugh a lot when Freud started talking about penis envy. I suppose that Freud might say that we have “repressed” our desire for penises. I think he just didn’t know very much about women and so he couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t want to be men. I can understand some of his theories about men’s fear of castration because it is such a common phenomenon that they even make jokes about it in movies. I thought the medicine museums were really interesting, if disturbing. While we were learning about the horrible living conditions of the time I was aware of the lack of food and clothing, but it didn’t occur to me that they were suffering so many diseases. I understood that medicine of the time was not as sophisticated as it is now, but I had no idea how limited their ability to successfully treat diseases was. Seeing the museum also helped me to understand how urban conditions could aggravate the insufficiencies of the medical field. People with inadequate and non-nutritious food sources, who worked all the time from too young an age, and lived with inadequate heat and ventilation would have horrible diseases even with our medicine today. It’s no surprise that these problems would occur. It is also no surprise that this was a period of social unrest that blossomed into the mass politics of the time. We also went to see the opera Don Giovanni by Mozart. That was quite an experience! It was an Italian Opera with German subtitles and a brief English synopsis where my only true second language is French. Trying to piece together what was going on was an international adventure. I wonder if that is what it was like to visit Vienna from an outlying province in the Hapsburg Empire. If so, I can understand why they would establish a government language. Without it, the nuances of meaning necessary for complex human interactions such as government could never have occurred. While at the theatre I wondered when it was built and whether during that time period if people did not have feet or knees. Neither of mine fit in the seat and made it very hard to pay attention because my muscles kept cramping up.

Trying to piece together what was going on was an international adventure.