Following the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Gestapo paid two visits to the Freud family house in Vienna, summoning Freud’s daughter Anna to an interrogation at their headquarters. The experience convinced Freud to “leave Vienna, for good.” On June 4, 1938, with the help of his ex-patient and psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, the Freud family embarked on the Orient Express for England. Freud settled in Hampstead, north London, in a house that his son Ernst renovated to reproduce the ambiance of Berggasse 19. Freud continued working there, most notably on his last monograph. No longer embedded in the intellectual milieu of Vienna, Freud, whose life work had been devoted to the talking cure, lamented the loss of language and the disappearance of his own speech to incurable jaw cancer, as if reenacting his earlier discoveries in the field of aphasia. His time in London was short. He died a free man on September 23, 1939.
The film above, “Professor Freud from Vienna to London via Paris, Part Two,” is titled in French, and begins with Sigmund Freud resting on the terrace of Princess Marie Bonaparte’s home in Paris on June 5, 1938. As the film continues, it presents moments with family and friends on his journey to 20 Maresfield Gardens. Later scenes show his children, grandchildren, friends and visitors to Freud’s new London home. The film is now housed at the Library of Congress.
A final recording of Freud's voice from the BBC (1938)
Diagram from The Ego and the Id (1923)
The image accompanies Freud’s famous explanation of the topographical model of the psyche. The Ego here sports a “cap of hearing” (akust.)—Freud writes, “It might be said to wear it awry.” The cap was left out of later versions of the diagram, in which he embraced a non-anatomically based distribution of sensory data (auditory and visual components of word presentation), subsuming them under the apparatus of perception.
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress
Oedipus (1867) Ferdinand Gaillard, French, 1834 - 1887
This print of Oedipus hung above Freud’s sofa in his Vienna and London clinics. “It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses....Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls victim to neurosis.... Its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherence of psycho-analysis from its opponents.”—Quote from Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality, 1905
After Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French (Montauban 1780 - 1867, Paris)
Image Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums,
© President and Fellows of Harvard College
Ego/Id/Super Ego, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1932
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress
EXPLORE THIS IMAGE IN DETAIL
Gradiva
© Freud Museum, London
EXPLORE THIS IMAGE IN DETAIL