The Ego, the Id and the Couch
LONDON — It may well be the most famous couch in history.
The divan on which Sigmund Freud received some 500 patients sits in the London home where he spent the last year of his life after his escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna. It is shaped like a chaise longue, with a Persian rug laid over it.
Freud would sit in a chair beside it to avoid eye contact with his patients.
The couch has been the centerpiece of the Freud Museum since it opened in 1986 inside a large brick house in the leafy north London area of Hampstead. The house and its contents were preserved by Freud’s daughter Anna, a pioneer of child psychoanalysis who lived and worked there until her death in 1982. Shortly before, she sold the property to a charity with the stipulation that a museum be established.
“When people enter the museum, it’s the couch that they want to see: It’s almost like a sacred secular relic,” said Giuseppe Albano, the museum’s director since July. He described the divan as “a magnet for visitors from all over the world,” drawn to “the human stories connected with it.”
Mr. Albano said the museum was especially relevant today as people have become increasingly concerned about their mental health, and Freud was central to the development of therapy and psychoanalysis.
When Freud first moved into the house in September 1938, he was happy with it. He wrote that it was “light, comfortable, spacious.” He enjoyed pleasant moments with his family, both indoors and in the garden, and met such luminaries as Salvador Dalí and Virginia Woolf. Yet the house also tells the story of his escape from the Nazis and of his battle with cancer.
The visit starts in the dining room, which is dominated by the wellknown portrait of Freud in a threepiece suit, cigar in hand. On another wall are smaller photographs that show Freud’s apartment in Vienna after he and his family fled to Britain. One shows a swastika banner hanging over the entrance to the building.
A display next door recalls the Freuds’ escape from Vienna. There is a tax certificate detailing the amount the family paid to secure permission to leave; a letter from the British Home Office authorizing Freud to practice psychoanalysis in London; and photographs of the trip from Vienna to Paris to London on the Orient Express.
“The feeling of triumph on being liberated is too strongly mixed with sorrow,” Freud wrote in a letter after leaving, “for in spite of everything I still greatly loved the prison from which I have been released.”
Nearby displays document the last year of Freud’s life. Alongside his round eyeglasses, wedding ring and overcoat are objects linked to his illness. Freud was diagnosed with cancer in 1923 and underwent 33 operations. He wore a prosthetic jaw that is now on display, next to the clothespins that he used to keep his mouth open. The pain became so excruciating that Freud died of assisted suicide: A morphine injection ended his life at 83, three weeks after the outbreak of World War II.
Mr. Albano said the museum was keen to draw attention to Freud’s original texts, because there was a danger otherwise that the original writings would be interpreted and reinterpreted, and his message would get lost. It plans to commemorate next year’s centenary of “The Ego and the Id.”
He said, “We would like the Freud Museum really to be at the vanguard of a renaissance in interest in Freud’s work.”