One day in the month of October 1921 a young André Breton visited Sigmund Freud at his Viennese studio and consulting room at 19 Berggasse—the writer tells this story in a text published in 1924 (Breton 1996a). The waiting room where the writer was seated awaiting the opening of the double door leading to the consulting room and the arrival of the professor contained armchairs of different styles. Allegorical prints, diplomas, and photographs hung from the walls—decoration that was as humdrum, tacky, and petit bourgeois as that of the remaining family rooms. Funnily enough, he who had challenged cultural restrictions, the malaise of the arts and therefore the idealization of the patriarchal home, had done so in the bosom of a placid petit bourgeois interior of fin-de-siècle Vienna (Casals 2003: 154–55). To a certain extent, the twentieth century was more Freudian than Freud, to quote Roudinesco (2016...

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