PŘÍBOR, NORTH MORAVIA

Mothers with strollers and old men with walkers amble down Freudova street, paying no attention to the large, plain house at the end of it.

Even for visitors armed with a map and a mission to find it, the place where Sigmund Freud was born is not readily apparent.

The residents of Příbor seem content to keep it that way, even as city officials prepare to celebrate the 150th birthday of the father of psychoanalysis May 6.

Many of them fought plans by town officials to restore Freud's house to the state it was in when he was born there in 1856 and to add an adjoining museum showcasing his life and work.

Until recently, the house was occupied, and for years, it was only adorned with a small bronze plaque marking its significance.

Freud is most certainly Příbor's most famous son, but he is just as certainly not their most favorite.

The good doctor, who pioneered the study of unconscious and preconscious phenomena and sought to discover how people are affected by impulses and feelings that are outside of their awareness, might well wonder: What's the issue with these folks?

Uphill battle

In an office on the northwest corner of náměstí Sigmunda Freuda, Příbor Mayor Milan Strakoš reveals that it took him two years of planning to get the site developed.

"The people worried about the project because they thought all this money would go to it with no return," he says.

The town of 8,700, 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) south of Ostrava, seems uninterested in its past in general, yet city officials have spent more than 8 million Kč ($340,000) refurbishing Freud's home since work began earlier this year. Strakoš will officially open the house May 26, at a ceremony attended by President Václav Klaus.

The mayor sought European Union funding for the modern museum, but the application was rejected because the Czech government never received a request to designate the site as culturally significant.

The house was given cultural heritage status by the Culture Ministry in 2005.

"The Czech people do not have such close ties to him," he says. "We have to do something to change that."

Analysis: Ambivalence

Miroslav Růžička, who will act as curator of the house once it opens, grew up in nearby Studénka. He says everyone in the area knows about Freud's birthplace, but no one really cares.

"The project should have been really big, but that didn't go over," he says. "They can't imagine what this project would have meant to Příbor."

But many factors tie into why Moravians have no taste for Freud.

Freud only lived in the Czech lands for three years before moving with his family to Vienna.

Many local people aren't aware of Freud's impact because his theories were banned during the Nazi occupation since they were the work of a Jew.

They were later forbidden during the communist regime.

"It was banned because it was considered bourgeois," says Olga Marlin, a Czech-born psychoanalyst who lived in the United States for 27 years. She adds that Freud's body of work, though seminal to the Western world, "was branded because it was concentrated on the individual and his or her development to be conscious of one's problems. This was not what the regime wanted."

And Marlin suspects that some remaining anti-Semitism may play a part as well.

"We have this problem in this country," says Marlin. "It would have been more pronounced in his time, but some of that feeling may have lingered."

For his part, at least, Freud held Příbor in high esteem. Recalling the town nearly seven decades after he left it, he wrote, "A happy childhood in Příbor has remained very deeply inside me, coming from that atmosphere and from that soil of first, indelible impressions."

Falling star

Many of Freud's ideas have either fallen out of favor or come under direct attack in the United States and Europe in the past few decades, largely because many of his theories are not verifiable by science.

That has also led some residents in Příbor to worry that the town is investing in something no one will want to see.

Strakoš doesn't see that as a problem.

"His ideas are found in films, they are found throughout popular culture, and many people are still using his ideas," he says. "His legacy will endure."

Marlin contends that Freud's legacy extends beyond any theories.

"He turned attention to the patients' experience," she says. "The relationship to the patient — accepting them as they are and being able to follow their own story — has had an extreme influence and it will continue to have one in the future."

Prague plans to get in on the celebration May 4–6 with an exhibition on Old Town Square that will give visitors an "imaginative process of initiation" into Freud's theories through the work of Czech artists.