The Psychology Behind Sigmund Freud’s House
Photo: Anadolu/Getty Images
West London’s Hampstead, with its redbrick houses hidden from high street traffic, reminds me of how pervasive British urban planning is. The neighborhood is eerily similar to many of those in Toronto—where I grew up—which meant walking the green-canopied streets felt more congenial to my concept of “home” than my apartment in Manhattan did. This introspect felt appropriate before touring the Sigmund Freud Museum, which I visited in the fall of 2022. While there was a sign disrupting its hedging, the Victorian house-museum did not otherwise stand out among its residential surroundings. We all know Freud was far more concerned with interiority, so I waited to pass full judgement.
Sigmund Freud's death anniversary
Self-interest, especially in one’s own childhood—exactly like the kind I’ve just demonstrated—isn’t a new crux, but our desire to classify ourselves (and others) by latent meaning is swelling. Maybe this is a consequence of pop-psych-speak, which is just a watered-down, popular Freudianism. In his book Genius, Harold Bloom calls this phenomenon Freud’s “mythology of the mind surviv[ing] his supposed science.” Though his scientific legitimacy has been rebuked, Freud’s validity, I’d argue, has increased for the self-involved masses: His concepts are foundational for parent-child attachment theories, or the “intimacy issues” of the mode (do these come from an ex? a parent? a combination?). It makes sense why he’s culturally popular at a time of prolific siloing via zodiac, introvert/extrovert divides, Myers-Briggs, or strawberry/tomato—and if you stretch it far enough, which people often do, you can apply the idea of “the subconscious” to any aesthetic, behavior, or choice in your life. Like, sometimes I see a home tour and I think, What does this interior say about its inhabitant’s psyche?
It may surprise you that Freud was also interested in architecture as a thought experiment. When he wanted to define the self-limitation of his own theories, Freud himself used the house as a metaphor. It went something like: If the exterior of a house is a human body, the interior is one’s mind. The attic becomes the superego, and then past the conscious ego of the dining room you’d stumble down into the unconscious basement.
Today, two Freud Museums exist: one house in Hampstead, one in Vienna. I was visiting the more commercialized former one with my friend, who had booked our tickets after touring the Austrian museum earlier that year. There, she had been ushered through the completely empty rooms by a guide who described, apparently with narrative flair, all the things that used to be there. Due to the Nazi occupation in Vienna, Sigmund Freud was forced to flee in 1938, after 78 years of residence in Austria. His home was catalogued and replicated in London for the last year of his life.
Sigmund Freud with a Cigar
Did this information make Freud’s London house feel a bit less authentic? I wondered. The main entrance affirmed this hesitation as it led us straight into a gift shop. Think of all the Freudian puns imaginable, then market them: Freudian slip-pers, iceberg fridge magnets, Persian rug tea towels. The gift shop sums up his current legacy—nestling into pop-culture is, inevitably, a move toward the commercial. I bought a keychain and understood that analyzing the house itself may be a tough job.
Which made sense, obviously, because a house-museum is not a house. Upstairs was a glass-box showcase of trinkets and educational devices, the opposite of a domestic interior. One room was dedicated to one of his most prolific legacies: the idea of reading dreams for latent meanings. A film of Freud reciting The Interpretation of Dreams was being projected, a seminal text which includes his thoughts on dream tropes such as “The Burning Child” (which is self-explanatory and, according to Freud, a sort of warning, horrifyingly.) There were also former-bedrooms dedicated to Anna Freud, a child psychologist in her own right, and Lucian, the grandson, had an entire room dedicated to his paintings.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud takes the word interior to mean a “diagnostic box” of the human mind. Apparently, an interior is able to disclose the psyche of the individual, and thus express their hidden desires and obsessions. This definition seems pretty close to that elusive idea of home, which John Berger defines as “a practice or set of practices [for which] everyone has his own.” Both these men think of interiors as subliminal ways to read someone’s psyche. And considering Freud recreated his Viennese interior in London, I assume he was very particular about his decorating practices—and thus his interior which, thankfully, was well-preserved in his ground-floor home office.
Sigmund Freud's death anniversary
Downstairs, over bobbing tourist heads, I caught my first glimpse of The Couch. You’ve seen those therapy scenes where a patient reclines on a chaise longue, facing away from the psychotherapist, who’s probably tapping their foot, nodding, or taking notes behind them. That calibration serves a purpose, according to Freud: As a site of potential discomfort, eye contact is not conducive to free association, which is what a therapist wants from their patients. The goal here was an incoherent-enough state wherein patients will start speaking loosely.
Positive blonde middle-aged woman psychologist talking to girl patient
The couch may also reach beyond clinical information-gathering towards a patients’ comfort. Apparently, this was Freud’s motive for draping a Persian rug over top of its cushions. This set up has inspired art and furniture today—notably, Franz West’s David Zwirner exhibitions come to mind—though it’s kind of weird to us to think about a scientist doing something for purely aesthetic reasons. When I sidled up to the grail’s velvet rope, though—which was positioned under a painting of a pouting girl (presumably by Lucian)—the saggy, rough-looking rug seemed less comfortable to lie on than if the couch were without. During the sole year of Freud’s residency here, this space largely functioned as an infirmary. His jaw cancer worsened until his benefit from a lethal morphine injection in 1939. I wondered whether it had happened on The Couch.
Freud’s Viennese home office, however, had seen the faces of thousands of patients. And those patients, upon entrance, similarly saw a shocking amount of ancient busts and statues occupying the shelves surrounding his couch and desk. I read that Freud’s collection of figurines tallied up to 2,000. In his Vienna house, they had been placed all around his study, facing inwards to make a sort of reverse-panopticon. In London, a few of them were on display—brought posthumously, since very few of his antiques made it to Maresfield Gardens with him. At first glance they didn’t seem cohesive by way of culture, but they shared an otherworldliness, and a handmade tarnish. Was the Couch’s positioning a decoy for the real gaze? The statues felt interrogative, like something or someone was already disappointed in me. I really was in the birthplace of talk therapy.
The early 20th century did see a gold rush of archaeological discovery, so the European appetite for antiquity was at a peak during this time. And apparently Freud’s obsession wasn’t explicitly tactical nor trendy: Collecting became one of his great passions after his father passed away in 1896. I wondered whether they were a distraction from grief, or a means of channelling the past, since Freud pulled heavily from ancient mythologies in his theories—Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan—to demonstrate the replicated human methods of power and sexual expression. He once described a dream, wherein his mother was flown through the air by “gods with falcons” heads from an “ancient Egyptian funerary relief.” There are records of him moving these figures around his study, using them as paperweights, swapping out the favorites on his desk—which was dark wood and presidential, Ivy League dean–like—maybe to guard his writings from any patients’ wandering eye. There are other good explanations for why he collected antiquities, ranging from their simple appreciation to their source of cognitive power. For Freud, I’m sure these objects lie somewhere in between these poles.
Freud And China Exhibition Opens At His Former Hampstead Home
I thought of the tacky Egyptian bookends my grandparents had in our Northern Ontarian cottage—the one of Nefertiti had been dropped, and the remnants of her nose was a white gash upon golden paint. They now sit bookless in my childhood basement. This was because my father loves to collect things that really should be thrown out, like pop can tabs or T-shirts shredded at the neckline. He inherited this behavior from his own father, who, in pursuit of never wanting things to go to waste, was very handy with glue and vices (not of the moral variety). Why was I thinking about dads at Freud’s house? But I couldn’t stop: I wondered whether Freud’s father was a collector as well, and whether this behavior was learned, since my own tiny NYC bedroom is overflowing with pillar candles, books, incense sticks, shoes I hardly wear, napkin drawings, magazine clippings and birthday cards pinned all over my wall. My familial Bergerian practice must be collecting, too, and though it isn’t a mechanism for grief, I think it serves my mental well-being by ways of nostalgia, comfort, and decorating on a budget.
Maybe collecting is just a prayer to the collective unconscious. Our Kondo-esque sensibilities would ask us to raze clutter in favor of clean surfaces and lonely, deliberate vases. I don’t think that ridding yourself of possessions is necessarily linked to a clear mind—I know plenty of minimalists who seem psychologically unwell because of their practice (and who said that a clear mind was the ideal, anyways?). Through his deliberate collection, careful tending-to, and lifetime of observation from study shelves, Freud’s objects were probably more saturated with his spirit than the walls of Maresfield Gardens. Living with things—knick-knacks, hobby collections, the products of online or trinket shop sifting—creates a narrative of you, one that people can study and glean personality from when they enter your spaces. And the relationship is reciprocal: The objects are imbibed with this narrative. Some people believe it’s bad luck to buy furniture second-hand in case it’s haunted. I certainly felt like this could’ve been the case in Freud’s study.
When I walked through the Freud Museum gift shop on my way out, I wondered how many of its tchotchkes offerings were set to be cherished. And if they were—as I still do, with my keychain, though the portrait has long since been eroded—maybe they were the closest thing to Freud’s interior, his prolific desires and practices, being carried forward.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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