Advocacy in history and culture

Abstract

We might well conceive of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna as providing the background for a paradigmatic project of Late Enlightenment: a ‘powerhouse of modernity’, as Charles Schorske once called it. The emergence of a widely renowned medical school was, in a variety of ways, characteristic for that project. Brilliant in diagnosis, nihilistic in therapy, the school searched for methods that we would nowadays categorize by the term advocacy. This chapter analyses two different yet closely interrelated concepts that are both, in their respective ways, aimed at the emancipation of the individual: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Julius Tandler’s social reconfiguration of a whole urban body.