Austrian Mint debuts three coin Vienna Schools of Psychotherapy set with Sigmund Freud

MINTS DESCRIPTION

All born into Jewish families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl were the founders of the three different Vienna schools of psychotherapy, the scientific discipline established in the Austrian capital in the 20th century. Freud (1856–1939) was the father of psychoanalysis, Adler (1870–1937) founded individual psychology, while Frankl (1905–1997) was the founder of logo therapy, the three pioneering schools of psychotherapy to which this fascinating series is dedicated. The men behind them feature on the obverse of each coin, while the reverse illustrates the core concept of their respective theories. Psychotherapeutic methods and theories have proliferated since the early days, but that might never have happened without the foundations laid by Freud, Adler and Frankl.

Born into a Jewish family on 6 May 1856, in the present-day Czech Republic, Freud, a neurologist, set up his clinical practice in Vienna in 1886. Using a technique called ‘Free association’, in which he encouraged his patients to talk freely without interruption or suggestion, and another known as ‘Transference’, in which patients transfer their feeling from previous relationships onto the relationship with the analyst, Freud made his name as the founder of psychoanalysis, with help from his mentor Josef Breuer (1842-1925). In 1938, Freud and his family fled Vienna for London to escape the Nazis. He died in the British capital in1939, but many terms attributed to Freud, such as ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘super ego’, ‘Freudian slip’ and ‘libido’, live on. The reverse of the coin illustrates the ‘will to pleasure’, a central element in Freud’s work, while a portrait of Freud, based on a photo taken in 1926 by Ferdinand Schmutzer, features on the coin’s obverse.