This year is the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth and also the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Freud Museum.
Sigmund Freud was the founder of Psychoanalysis (the study of the unconscious mind and how repressed memories may influence conscious thought and actions). This study spawned a range of terms to describe certain behaviour such as id, ego, super-ego and Oedipus complex among many others.
You can now visit the house (now The Freud Museum) where he spent the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX. The museum is clearly sign-posted from Finchley Road Tube Station (on the Metropolitan Line). The walk from the station takes about 10 minutes. Admission to the Museum costs £5 (per adult) and children under 12 go free.
Background
Freud lived in Vienna at Berggasse 19 for 47 years. The Jewish psychoanalytical community in Vienna had been subjected to much harassment. Several Swastikas (used by Hitler as the official sign of the Nazi Party) were placed on the front of Freud’s House. Freud and his family escaped to London from the persecution of the *** in Austria in the late 1930s. Their new home became 20 Maresfield Gardens which is now the Freud Museum.
The Museum
In the Museum you can watch footage from the Freud family home movies, listen to an interview with a photographer who compiled a visual record of Freud’s working environment at his home in Berggasse 19 in Vienna and discover the story of how these photographic negatives survived the war to become the valuable historic documents that they are today.
Freud’s son Ernst and housekeeper Paula Fichtl recreated a similar working environment in the house in Maresfield Gardens to that in Vienna.
On the ground floor in the Study and Library you can see the original analytical couch upon which patients would relax whilst Freud sat in a chair to one side listening to their “free associations”. Often some antique figures would be placed between the chair and the couch. Freud was a great collector of antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient. These figures were frequently used by Freud in his work to stimulate or illustrate new ideas and many are on display in the house. You can also view a pen and ink sketch of Freud by world famous artist Salvador Dali.
At the moment (August 2006), there is an amusing exhibition of cartoons from the New Yorker publication which play on America’s obsession with psychoanalysis and the relationship between the patient and psychiatrist.
Throughout the house there are examples of various dreams and the interpretations drawn by Freud.
Despite suffering from cancer of the palate, Freud continued to work throughout the last years of his life and maintained his practice receiving a number of patients at 20 Maresfield Gardens.
A visit to the Freud Museum should take you a couple of hours at the most. Although you cannot take photographs in the house, there is a very pleasant view which you could take at the front of the house under the blue plaques commemorating Sigmond and Anna Freud. Afterwards, you could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath or return to Finchley Road for a coffee/drink at one of the many bars/restaurants in the area.
persecution
For further information, take a look at the official website of the Freud Museum at http://www.freud.org.uk/