Karen Chernick
Sigmund Freud’s Desk.
Courtesy of the Freud Museum London.
When Sigmund Freud fled
Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, at age 82, there was only one prized object among
his many earthly possessions that he couldn’t imagine life without: a Roman
copy of a 2nd-century bronze statue of the goddess Athena. For years, this female
deity of reason, war, and handicraft occupied center stage on the desk where
the founder of psychoanalysis wrote his pioneering theories on the
subconscious. She was just one member of an enormous audience of statuettes
that watched the Austrian doctor work from the edges of his desk and the
cabinets lining his office.
In addition to being a
collector of dreams, psychological conditions, and verbal slips, Freud was also
an avid collector of antiquities. “The psychoanalyst,” he said to an early
patient famously dubbed the Wolf Man, “like the archaeologist in his
excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before
coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.” Freud spent his career
exposing his patients’ countless psychic layers, but by the time of his death,
just one year after leaving Vienna for London, he had also managed to amass
over 2,000 physical treasures from ancient kingdoms in Egypt, Greece, Rome,
India, China, and Etruria.
Freud began accumulating
this extensive collection in 1896 at an important juncture in his life. His
father had just died; he was busy setting up his very first office and was on
the verge of beginning his own self-analysis. Since he was still at the outset
of his career (and supporting a family of six children), Freud initially didn’t
have much disposable income to devote to his collecting habit. As a result, his
earliest purchases were plaster reproductions of Italian sculptures, including
Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (ca. 1513).
As Freud grew more established
and his tastes became more refined, he limited himself to collecting only
original objects from antiquity, treasure-hunting in Vienna’s commercial
antiquities market. The artworks that hung above his now-famous couch, where
patients reclined during their psychoanalytic treatments, included an ancient
Roman frieze, a 3rd-century Egyptian mummy portrait, and a reproduction of
French Neoclassical artist Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the
Sphinx (1808). While the latter is admittedly a copy of a painting, the
mythical Greek theme it depicts was cherished by the man who both identified
himself with Oedipus—surmounting the riddles of the subconscious—and also
theorized the Oedipus complex.
The walls of Freud’s
Viennese and London offices offered a medley of places and periods. “Freud’s
own display style was personal,” explained Bryony Davies, assistant curator at
the Freud Museum in London. “His objects all appear in his unique way.” Freud’s
original curatorial choices have been maintained by the house museum, which has
preserved his study exactly as it was arranged at the time of his death in
1939. Athena was the first to traverse the English Channel to Freud’s London
office, but the rest of his antiquities soon followed, thanks to the advocacy
of his former patient and colleague, Princess Marie Bonaparte, and help from
the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
While his walls were a
pastiche of style, Freud’s cabinets, on the other hand, were categorically
arranged. In the collection’s London home, a group of Eros statues shares the
same shelf, funerary Egyptian objects are clustered in another, and ancient
Greek lekythoi vessels are displayed together. “This makes them look quite
orderly amid the mixture of objects,” Davies noted of the overall assemblage of
diverse objects, loosely unified by the fact that they caught the
psychoanalyst’s interest. “The most notable exception to this is Freud’s
desk—this is where he put his favorite objects, as well as his practical ones.”
Keeping Athena company is a mishmash of items both aesthetic and practical,
antique and modern. Egyptian goddesses stand alongside pens; cigar boxes are
within reach of a Tang Dynasty Chinese figure.
Sigmund Freud at his desk
in his Vienna home. Photo via Getty Images.
A particularly prized
object stands on the right hand side of the desk: a marble statuette of the
ancient Egyptian god Thoth. Paula Fichtl, Freud’s loyal housekeeper (and a
master at dusting his clustered collection while maintaining its painstaking
arrangement), recalled the doctor patting Thoth’s bulbous, baboon-like head
each morning and stroking it while writing or deep in thought. Thoth is
credited with inventing hieroglyphics, written symbols that intrigued Freud.
“Perhaps the connections between Freud’s collections and his theoretical work
are most clearly demonstrated in his interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs,” said
Stefan Marianski, education officer at the museum. “He sometimes compared
dreams to hieroglyphic texts which could be deciphered with the right tools.”
The many two-faced figures
Freud owned also suggest an overlap between his art collection and ideas. A
bronze amulet of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, and a bronze
container with a maenad’s face sculpted on one side and a satyr on the other
are two notable examples. Dualism was a prominent part of Freud’s thinking, and
is reflected in many of his theories, including principles that pit pleasure
versus reality, the connection between libido and aggression, and life and
death instincts, referred to as Eros and Thanatos.
Sigmund Freud’s Desk.
Courtesy of the Freud Museum London.
Freud surrounded himself
with visual sources of inspiration that made their way into his manuscript
pages, confining the thousands of objects he stockpiled to the consultation
room and study that constituted his workspace. The rest of his home was
conventionally bourgeois, decorated with family photographs and fin-de-siecle
furnishings. The Wolf Man later recalled that Freud’s study didn’t have the
look of “a doctor’s office but rather of an archaeologist’s study.”
Being surrounded by his
collection may have encouraged Freud to use familiar archeological terms in
order to explain his process of delving into the subconscious. “I arrived at a
procedure which I later elevated to a method,” Freud wrote around the time he
began collecting. “The procedure of clearing away, layer by layer, the
pathogenic psychical material, which we like to compare with the technique of
excavating a buried city.”
Of course, psychoanalysis
and archaeology are not the same. “Psychical objects are incomparably more
complicated than the excavator’s material ones,” he notes in Constructions in
Analysis (1937). “The main difference between them lies in the fact that for
the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end of his endeavors, while
for analysis the construction is only a preliminary labor.” Collecting seems to
have been a preliminary labor for Freud, too. He had assembled what was, to
him, a visual illustration of an ancient past subconsciously interred in our
collective modern psyche. But the work did not end in bringing his trinkets
home—it was there that they sprouted new meanings to help explain our
present-day existence.
Karen Chernick
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-sigmund-freuds-massive-art-collection-influenced-theories?utm_medium=email&utm_source=14787634-newsletter-editorial-daily-10-17-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V
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