Vienna Blood 3-4: Transference

Checking in with a review of the next two-part episode of Vienna Blood - #s3 and 4, on PBS - aired two weeks ago, and the week before last.  Another excellent historical whodunnit, which, much like the first two episodes, made you feel like you were in Vienna in the first decade of the 20th-century, even though I was never there.

The big takeaway of this second story is that Max and Clara have finally come to their senses, and ended their betrothment - or, rather, Clara has come to her senses, after nearly being raped by a bad guy who is not the murderer, though that had little to do with her decision.  But Clara realizes that Max loves someone else.

That would be Amelia, Max's cured patient, who previously told Max she couldn't see him any more, in any way, given that Max was engaged to Clara, whom Amelia met with Max.   Clearly, Max and Amelia are falling in love, but that raises an ethical issue which the fledgeling Freudians of that time likely have not yet considered: transference, or patients falling in love with their therapists, and some kind of vice versa.  I was a Psych major for a while at CCNY in the 1960s, and I don't remember exactly when the psychoanalytic group became aware of this phenomenon, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't quite that early.

Meanwhile, regarding other accoutrements of that Edwardian age, we again got to see a disk playing music, and someone mentioned getting a call, which in context sounded like it referred to a telephone call.  Good.  But I was surprised that dueling was still so apparently common in 1907 Vienna.  The last time I heard about it was Hamilton vs. Burr in the United States more than a century earlier.  Did Europe hold on to that medieval-rooted custom a century longer?

In any case, Vienna Blood is a top-drawer series, and I'm looking forward to seeing more.

See also Vienna Blood 1-2: Demons in the Architecture

Vienna Blood 1-2: Demons in the Architecture

Took a few minutes (actually closer to 90) out of everything else to watch the first two episodes (actually, one episode, broken into two parts) of Vienna Blood on PBS (my wife aptly flagged it).
It's an excellent historical detective drama, set in 1906 Vienna, with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler making cameo appearances, and astute historical details (we see a disk not a cylinder on the phonograph - the disk, invented by Berliner, would indeed have been playing there and then, not Edison's cylinder, invented, earlier, in the US).

Max Liebermann is a young psychologist in the even younger field of Freudian psychology. Oskar Reinhardt is a detective with a difficult even harrowing personal story (his daughter died and his wife left him).  Their superiors in one way or another are all calcified idiots.  The two make an outstanding team.

Other important aspects of the milieu include anti-semitism - Max and his family are Jewish - and a city which, at this time, was one of the most impressive cultural capitals in the world.  Art, music, and angels in the architexture (to quote Paul Simon) are very much at hand.  But this world also contains demons in the form of human murderers, and that's what this little series is all about:  how an early profiler and a more seasoned lawman can solve crimes and bring the bad guy to justice.

Give that this is a mystery, I won't say anything more about the plot.  I will say that it was well developed and resolved.   I did wonder about a few missing historical details - I didn't spot any automobiles or telephones.   There had to be a least a few of them in 1906 Vienna.  But there was a mention of Jung's "shadow self," which tracks perfectly with history, since Jung sent his Studies in Word Association to Freud in Vienna in 1906.

I'll try to be back here in two weeks with a single review of the next two-part episode.