Many people, very often especially those with a nationalistic or xenophobic approach to life, have a similar life course, with culturally mixed and often unwelcome origins.
For some people, however, it is an unbearable idea not to really belong anywhere, and they then, under collective pressure to adapt, decide in favour of the beliefs of the majority society, in which they construct their desired we-feeling restrictively to the exclusion of the "others", and to a certain extent pursue the rejected and split off own personality parts in the "other".
Continued ambivalence or, in psychoanalytical terms, the ability to keep the third object in experience is a cultural achievement that has nothing to do with formal education or intelligence, but exclusively a question of psychological maturity, or, to put it more simply, a question of sincerity and heart formation.
In Tyrol, an area in the heart of Europe, where people from the most diverse areas of origin had moved through on this side and beyond the main Alpine ridge since the end of the Ice Age, before a small part of it settled permanently, there has been a particularly strong need to conform since the Counter-Reformation in the 17th century.
After the fall of the Roman Empire and the epoch of the Great Migration of peoples up to the end of the Middle Ages, it was only through the Enlightenment of the 18th century to allow people of both sexes and ethnic origins in their diversity, even different languages, religions and ways of life to be seen as a social asset rather than a threat to one's own patriarchally defined tribal identity.
Self-reflection, let alone an admission of guilt for the numerous anti-science, fascist and anti-Semitic crimes of the past cannot be marketed for tourism, also due to the lack of interest of many foreign visitors, who often bring their own idealizing idea of healthy country life with them on vacation, and therefore fall into denial, cover-up and collective oblivion.
When I decided to move to Lake Achensee in 2012 to live and work here, I was well aware of the discrepancy between the beautiful nature and the friendly residents on the one hand and the often rather gloomy aspects of rural livelihoods on the other: many of my father's Tyrolean relatives had once fled from brute force, ignorance and alcoholism as far as New York and San Francisco.
Nevertheless, I was able to follow up on important events in the history of psychoanalysis since the summer of 1900: Sigmund Freud, who had published his epoch-making work on the interpretation of dreams in Vienna in 1899, met his colleague Wilhelm Fließ a few times in different places on the Achensee to discuss and argue about human psychological bisexuality.
100 years later, in the summer of 2000, an international congress on the history of psychoanalysis took place in Pertisau, in memory of those questions, which are known under the term "The Achensee Question" in psychoanalysis. What is meant is the question of the psychological and also biological aspects of human androgyny.