Freud Museum

The Freud Museum houses a huge collection of personal antiquities owned by Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud. Freud was an antique collector and had amassed more than 2500 artefacts from the markets of Vienna, Rome, Salzburg, and Florence. You can witness objects like Greco-Roman statues, Neolithic tools, Etruscan vases, rings, precious stones, Sumerian seals, Egyptian mummy bandages, statues of gods, amulets and Chinese jade lions. The centrepiece of Freud Museum is Freud’s study where you can find his psychoanalytic couch and anthropomorphic church that are preserved in their original form.

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The Freud Museum houses an extensive archive of documents related to Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and other significant people. The Sigmund Freud archive contains around 10,000 letters and 1600 documents depicting his personal life and works in psychoanalysis. The museum is yet to add 1600 press cuttings from 1926 to 1939 to the archives. You can also see archives of documents related to other renowned figures including Dorothy Burlingham, Oscar Nemon, Martin Freud, Lucie Freud, Walter Freud, Jula Weiss, and Hanns Lange. These archives can be accessed for serious research requests and the documents can be consulted only at the museum.

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Sigmund Freud Library in the Freud Museum has over 1600 books from his personal collection that testify his prolific reading. You can see books from different genres like art, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, science and medicine. Authors represented on the shelves of the library include Darwin, Locke, Feuerbach, Krafft-Ebing, Shakespeare, Goethe and Dostoevsky. You can also see books which were gifted to Freud by friends, colleagues and fans along with notes, name inscriptions and handwritten dedications. Wilhelhm Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, Balzac’s ‘La Peau de chagrin’ and publications of Heinrich Schliemann are the highlights of Sigmund Freud Library.

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Apart from the huge collection of European antiquities from Greece and Egypt, the Freud Museum also features Sigmund Freud’s American collection. Though the American collection is small, you can witness ancient treasures and rare relics from Central America and South America. You can see a terracotta statuette of a kneeling figure from Mexico which Freud must have acquired in the 1920s or early 1930s. The Moche vase, in the shape of a figure depicting a dignitary, is suspected to be a gift given to Freud by a Peruvian doctor, Honorio Delgado. Both these pre-Columbian objects of Freud are funerary objects to be placed in tombs.

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Sigmund Freud’s personal collection of antiquities provide a glimpse not only into his life and work but also into the history of ancient cultures and societies. The Freud Museum works hard to protect these vintage relics from environmental damage and climatic changes. The purpose of conservation is to preserve the integrity of the artefacts while caring for them. Some of the museum’s objects made of ivory, ceramics, glass, bronzes and painted wood were given a conservation treatment by a renowned conservator, Julia Park-Newman. She also fixed the skirt in the bronze statue of Minerva, replaced the animal glue with original ceramic and reattached the loose paint on the horse figurine. 

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The Freud Museum operates a huge photo library that showcases portraits of Freud from 1884 to 1939 and pictures of his family that provide a glimpse into his personal life. You can also see contemporary photographs of the house, Freud’s iconic couch and his study and historic photographs of the psychoanalytic movement. The photo library also has pictures of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s personal collection of antiquities along with Freud's extensive collection of prints. Copyrights and other rights of all the photographs in the photo library belong to the museum and high resolution digital images are available to licence for publication.

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