Resting Places: Desecration and Restoration of the Sacred

This roundtable explores the psychic and cultural significance of sacred places, particularly those marked by religious conflict, desecration, and dispossession. Panelists will explore how sites of violence and loss also become spaces of remembrance, ritual reclamation, and healing. The conversation includes a reflection on the restoration of a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Vienna, a powerful act of mourning and cultural remembrance, Jerusalem as a sacred site for Muslims, and the meanings of sacred space within the Christian tradition. Through a psychoanalytic lens, sacred places are considered not only as geographic locations but also as symbolic containers of grief, history, and resilience, holding the potential for psychic transformation.

The roundtable is the second part of the roundtable-series “Rooted & Displaced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meaning of Place,” a collaboration of the Freud Foundation US, the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. The series explores the psychic significance of place for human beings—its capacity to hold memory, shape identity, carry trauma, and act as a site of symbolic transformation. Held across three locations—Vienna, New York City, and Stockbridge, MA—the series brings together psychoanalysts, historians, cultural theorists, and clinicians in conversation about the meaning of place to human beings, considering: displacement, discovery of place, sacred places, virtual place and technology, and the evolving meaning of place in both physical and virtual realms.

As questions of dislocation, ecological loss, technological life, and cultural reclamation take center stage globally, these Roundtables offer a multidisciplinary reflection on how we live in—and with—places, and how we navigate the complex psychic terrain of rootedness and rupture.