![]() ![]() ![]() Why did Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” surround himself with pagan idols? And how did these objects influence his theories? A new exhibition at the Freud Museum, “ Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire,” seeks to provide an answer. Sigmund Freud next to his copy of Michelangelo’s “The Dying Slave,” in 1911. It is Freud’s study, a strange, shamanic place, packed to the brim with his old and grubby gods. But one of its rooms-a long, rectangular space that runs the length of the house-is anything but typical. Now known as the Freud Museum, it’s an unremarkable home with typical bourgeois trappings-plants, books, family photographs, heavy Austrian furniture. (He was again indebted to Bonaparte, who paid the Nazis a heavy ransom, in the guise of an income tax, to get Freud and his objects to safety.) The family moved into a brick house on a quiet residential street in Hampstead, in North London. The rest of his belongings, including his psychoanalytic couch, followed soon after. Would his beloved collection make it with him? While the Gestapo waited outside his apartment, Freud’s friend and pupil Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon, smuggled out two of his favorite objects-a small bronze statuette of Athena and a Chinese jade screen-by stashing them in her handbag.įreud arrived in London with his wife and daughter on June 6, 1938. A network of international supporters began scheming to get Freud out of Austria. She returned home unharmed, but the ordeal confirmed the family’s need to flee. On March 22nd, the Gestapo arrested Freud’s daughter Anna and carted her away for interrogation. “I have sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities,” he wrote to the novelist Stefan Zweig, adding that he had “actually read more archaeology than psychology.” Freud even took his “old and grubby gods,” as he called them, on holiday with him. “I must always have an object to love,” he confessed to Carl Jung. After returning home with a new trophy, he would bring it to the dinner table as a companion, and he often lined up favorites on his desk. He went treasure hunting in markets in Vienna, Salzburg, Florence, and Rome. Since the eighteen-nineties, Freud had been collecting ancient artifacts, amassing a private museum of more than two thousand Greco-Roman statues, busts, Etruscan vases, rings, precious stones, Neolithic tools, Sumerian seals, Egyptian mummy bandages, Chinese jade lions, and Pompeiian penis amulets. The Nazis had no interest in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, which they deemed “degenerate,” but the looters may have had their eyes on the doctor’s astonishing collection of antiquities. Storm Troopers swooped through his apartment, helping themselves to money. His books were destroyed and his publishing house seized. A swastika was hung above the entrance to his building. “ Finis Austriae,” Freud wrote in his diary. The German Reich had annexed Austria on March 13th, and Hitler paraded through Vienna the next day, to the cheers of supporters and the terror of the city’s Jews. In the spring of 1938, the Nazis were circling like vultures around Berggasse 19, the Vienna home of Sigmund Freud. ![]()
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