The Freud Museum can take a joke

A psychiatrist instructs a patient on his couch: “I’ll say a normal word, then you say the first sick thing that pops into your head.” Another phones his wife to say: “I’m going to be late, dear. It’s total craziness here.”

“On the Couch: Cartoons From the New Yorker,” an exhibition of more than 80 drawings that poke unabashed fun at psychotherapy, goes on display today in Vienna, and the setting couldn’t be more appropriate: the Sigmund Freud Museum, located in the apartment where the good doctor first hung out a shingle and began treating patients.

“I think he’d enjoy them,” curator Michael Freund said. “I’m not so sure he’d appreciate the Freud-bashing. But by now he’d be too old to care.”