Prague chooses goat over Freud

PRAGUE: Residents of an historic Prague neighbourhood have voted down a proposal to erect a monument to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, district mayor Petr Hejma announced on Saturday.

Some voters in the Friday referendum said they would prefer a goat statue instead of the proposed Freud sculpture because it was to be located in an area known as Kozi Placek, or Goat Square, near the tourist-heavy Old Town Square.

About 75 per cent of voters said no to the proposed sculpture, which was to portray Freud seated at a table, in the nonbinding referendum, Hejma said.

Only about six per cent of the neighbourhood's 2,300 voters took part, he said.

Prague's city government will take the final decision on whether to erect the monument.

Freud, who was known for his work with the subconscious, was born in the eastern Czech town of Priborborn and later moved to Austria with his family. He died in 1939.

After the sculpture proposal drew criticism, officials called for a neighbourhood referendum.

An association called Friends of the Goat was formed, which said a Freud monument could be placed anywhere, while 'a statue of a goat can only be situated on Goat Square.'

"First, the statue is hideous, and second, Freud surely never heard of Kozi Placek," said a woman in her sixties after voting on Friday. "We should put a goat statue there instead."

There has been increased attention on Freud in the Czech Republic recently, with a museum in the house where he was born opening last year.

Freud's theories were banned under the Nazi occupation and suppressed under the subsequent communist regime.