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This is a rendering of Freud’s consulting room, with a glimpse through a doorway into his bookshelf-lined private study, at his home, Berggasse 19, Vienna. The consulting room has been arranged with the comfort of Freud’s patients in mind. Anchoring this illustration, we see his famous couch, covered with a colorful oriental carpet and piled high with pillows. A “typical Viennese ceramic tile stove” warms the room. Blankets, for use by patients, sit at the foot of the couch. Sitting on his chair in the corner, behind the patient’s head, Freud could survey the pictures, photographs, and mementoes that grace the room’s walls, as well as the hundreds of antiquities displayed on every available surface. The overall effect on visitors was overwhelming; the whole, wrote a psychoanalyst later, is “an embarrassment of riches.” The presence of so many figures from the past served as an invitation to patients “to rediscover [their] own origins and buried history.”
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