Having lived in Vienna since 1860, in summer 1938 Sigmund Freud and his family were forced to move to London under pressure by the Nazi regime of their native Austria. Despite the hurtful nature of the journey, Freud was finally realising a childhood dream to move to England. Thanks to the assistance of the Greek princess Marie Bonaparte, a dear friend of Angelos Katakouzenos as well, he managed to transport to his new country almost the totality of his moveable possessions. He lived at the house on Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, North London, for one happy year, surrounded by friends and relatives. His advanced age and fragile health did not prevent him from setting up his study with the same furniture, books and objects he was surrounded with at his Bergasee flat, from welcoming guests and sometimes even patients and from working on his last book.

 

After his death in September 1939, his wife Martha and daughter Anna, a fellow psychoanalyst, continued to live in the Hampstead house. Almost half a century later, in 1986, the Freud Museum opened its gates to the public with the aim of keeping alive the memory of Sigmund and Anna Freud through publications, educational programmes and exhibitions within the preserved rooms where the great thinker lived and worked in the last year of his life. The Freud Museum is

 

.a fascinating cult site, a place of mythic memory, a shrine, a monument, a haunted house."

 

The similarities between the Hampstead house and the Athens flat are touching indeed. They were both residences of distinguished researchers, the father of psychoanalysis and the greatest Greek psychiatrist of his generation, trained at the famous Salpetriere hospital in Paris, inspired by the theories of Professor Jean-Martin Charcot and dedicated to the interpretation of the mysteries of the human soul. Although Freud was the founder of the Psychoanalytic School, he had experimented with narcoanalysis, the method adopted by Katakouzenos. Their offices, decorated with interwar furniture (Katakouzenos's office was first set up in his house on Pindarou Street in the 1930s), books and works of art given by friends and patients, were preserved intact to our day thanks to the loving effort of their beloved. Both houses were shelters for residents and visitors in times happy and difficult.

This small photographic exhibition introduces the interiors and collections inhabited and amassed by Sigmund Freud as they are preserved today at the Freud Museum, the Katakouzenos Residence's closer relative.

(quotes from the book 20 Maresfield Gardens, A Guide to the Freud Museum, London 1998)

SIGMUND FREUD'S STUDY

 

 

The three photographs show different views into the study of Sigmund Freud in his Hampstead house. The undisputed focus of the room is of course his celebrated sofa bed, covered in Oriental carpets under a lithographic print of the well-known painting by Pierre-Andre Brouillet titled Un lecon clinique a la Salpetriere (1887). A similar print exists in Angelos Katakouzenos's office. The profusion of items on the table and bookcases within this room were mostly given as gifts by friends and patients to Freud, who was an avid antiquities collector and had bought the rest himself. Both Freud and Katakouzenos believed that people could attain inner peace, inspiration and a higher intellectual ground by immersing themselves into art and gazing at objects endowed with special power, like antiquities.

 

FREUD AT WORK

 

In the first photograph Freud is working at his desk in London, probably on his last work Moses and monotheism. The peculiar chair he sits upon was especially designed for him by the architect Felix Augenfeld in 1930. The second photograph the surface of his desk can be seen, strewn with human figures made of bronze, clay and stone and coming from China, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Freud's fondness for these antiquities was not unusual for his time, when even far eastern artefacts were widely collected. Several Chinese figurines, probably the ones visible in the photograph and dating from the Sui dynasty (AD 581-619), were offered to Freud by Princess Marie Bonaparte during his brief stay in Paris on his way to London.

 

FREUD AND GREECE

 

 

The work of Sigmund Freud is dotted with references to Greek mythology. The power of libido, i.e. sexual force, was personified in Greek myth by the god Eros, several statuettes of whom had been collected by Freud. The one seen here, dating from the second century BC, was probably once holding a lyre and comes from the town of Myrina in Asia Minor. Freud bought it on September 5, 1934. The so-called 'Fayyum' portraits, like the one depicting a middle-aged man, were very popular with collectors of interwar central Europe. Their unpretentious realism and psychological depth must have exercised particular attraction to Freud, ever fascinated by the unconscious.

 

THE TRIP TO GREECE

 

 

In 1904 Sigmund Freud travelled for the first and last time in Greece. No photographs survive from this trip, only postcards like the one depicted with a view of the Isthmus of Corinth, mailed to his wife Martha and a few letters. The print depicts a view of the Athenian Acropolis and was also part of his collection. Freud described his experience upon climbing the Acropolis with his brother Alexander in a text addressed to Romain Rolland, titled A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. In front of the Parthenon he was overwhelmed by a strange feeling (Erlebnis) that whatever he saw was too good to be true, that it was a message and a meditation on death and immortality. This feeling nested in his soul and was recalled in his 1936 text, at the pinnacle of his life and career. The same view that shook so deeply the father of psychoanalysis accompanied and pacified Angelos Katakouzenos during the long years of his own effort at the Othonos Steet practice.

 

texts by George Manginis and Sophia Peloponnissiou-Vassilacou