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Tuesday January 7, 1997

Freud home: museum or a brothel?

TOM GROSS
Jerusalem Post Service

Plans to turn the birthplace of Sigmund Freud, who revealed the central role of sexuality in human nature, into a museum have been thwarted by the current owner -- who has turned the building into a massage parlor.

"I think Freud would have regarded the house's current usage with some amusement," says Shmuel Erlich, the Sigmund Freud professor of psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The owner, Josef Matula, is blocking attempts by the town council in Pribor, northeastern Moravia, to open a museum dedicated to the father of psychoanalysis. Pribor is now in the Czech Republic but was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time of Freud's birth in 1856.

"We want to restore the building to what it looked like when the Freuds lived there," says Pribor Deputy Mayor Jan Monsport.

Instead, a huge sign saying "Massage Therapy" in Czech is now displayed outside the house.

Since the collapse of communism, many hundreds of "massage parlors," most of which are in fact brothels, have sprung up all over the Czech Republic.

It is not clear how Freud would have interpreted the development, but local officials seem content with the phenomenon.

"We don't mind sexual services being offered in other parts of Freud's native town," said a local official in Pribor, "but not in the home of our most famous son."

During the communist era, discussion of much of Freud's ideas was banned, but Pribor officials managed to erect a monument in the town square to him in 1969.

There are museums devoted to Freud in Vienna, where he spent most of his life, and in his former house in London, where he fled with his family after his daughter's detention by the Gestapo in 1938.

The Freud Museum in London contains his library, study and his famous psychoanalytic couch.

But Jerusalem is the only place that has a Sigmund Freud chair endowed at the Hebrew University.

"Although Freud was not at all religious, he was nevertheless proud of his Jewish identity, and often spoke at the Vienna B'nai B'rith," says Erlich.

"He was sympathetic to the Jewish people's suffering and was on the board of the trustees of the Hebrew University in the 1920s and '30s."

An exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art of paintings by his grandson, Lucien, is currently drawing large crowds.

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