Mayor Ludwig presented the certificate to the psychoanalyst and contemporary witness
Vienna (OTS/RK) – On Monday, the psychoanalyst and contemporary witness Erika Freeman was made an honorary citizen of the city of Vienna in the town hall. Mayor Michael Ludwig presented the certificate in the presence of numerous guests of honor from politics and administration, including the second President of the National Council Doris Bures and former Federal President Heinz Fischer, who gave the laudatory speech. Following the ceremony, Mayor Ludwig, together with Freeman, unveiled the marble plaque of honor, which now had her name added, in front of the City Senate meeting room in the town hall.
In his welcoming speech, Mayor Ludwig highlighted Freeman’s personal and professional work, through which “she brought the psychoanalysis rooted in Vienna into the world.” As a renowned psychoanalyst, Freeman has also helped many people, including prominent Hollywood stars. Despite her terrible fate, Freeman managed to “regain access to her hometown and make peace.” It was an “outstanding and impressive achievement to process the trauma of expulsion and exile, to overcome hatred and to believe in the good in people again,” said the mayor at the end of his speech.
Former Federal President Heinz Fischer spoke about Freeman’s career, including “all the horrors she had to experience as a child”. Freeman’s father managed to escape to Prague in 1938, where he was interned in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Freeman only found out many years later that he managed to escape from there to the USA, when she met her father, who was believed to be dead, again by chance in New York. Her mother was able to escape from a concentration camp and live secretly as a “submarine” in Vienna, but was killed in a bombing raid a few days before the end of the war. Freeman had to experience all of this at a young age, but she was “never bitter or broken by the events”. Instead, Freeman had “the qualifications, strength and empathy to become a luminary of psychoanalysis.” To achieve the goal of “coming to terms with the horrors from 1938 onwards, Freeman has done an enormous amount of work.” You can “not make amends for anything from the past, but you can work through it successfully.” Being an honorary citizen of the city of Vienna is a recognition and appreciation for her life’s work, the former Federal President concluded.
To person
Erika Freeman was born Erika Polesiuk in Vienna in 1927 and lived with her family in the 2nd district. In the 1930s she experienced increasing anti-Semitism and the Nazi takeover. In February 1940, at the age of 12, she fled via Rotterdam by ship to New York, where she stayed with relatives. She studied psychology and worked as a secretary in the branch of the Jewish Agency. In 1954 she married the graphic artist, sculptor and calligrapher Paul K. Freeman. In 1964 she received her doctorate with a thesis on the position of the family in the kibbutz. After her divorce in 1980, she Hebrewized her birth name to “Padan” and from then on also appeared as Erika Padan Freeman. As part of her work, she advised many politicians, including former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and various Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen and others. Freeman has been working as a contemporary witness against forgetting since 2007 as part of the “A Letter To The Stars” project. In 2017 she received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. In 2022, Freeman regained Austrian citizenship and is now a dual US-Austrian citizen.
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