Freud’s desk at Maresfield Gardens, London. Photo Ivan Ward, courtesy The Freud Museum
The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds is showing an exhibition of sculptures collected by groundbreaking psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Freud’s Sculpture, running until April 23 2006, sheds new light on his collection of antiquities, letting visitors view them from the thinker’s own perspective.
A replica of Freud’s armchair has been placed in front of a desk where the sculptures are arranged similarly to the display at his home in Maresfield Gardens, London (now the Freud Museum). The psychoanalyst kept a small but regularly changing selection on his desk and many of his favourite pieces have been brought to Leeds for the exhibition.
Max Pollak, Etching of Sigmund Freud at his Desk (1914). Courtesy The Freud Museum
Rather than provide answers to Freud’s own relationship with his sculptures, the exhibition encourages viewers to ask their own questions and form their own opinions on the nature of the obsession of the father of psychoanalysis.
He counted collecting, alongside smoking, as one of his main addictions, amassing thousands of pieces, from Egypt, China, Greece and Rome, in wood, bronze, stone and marble.
Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, but spent most of his life in Vienna where he developed his groundbreaking ideas. He is known for dream analysis and the study of his patients’ childhoods, believing that many psychological problems were sexual in nature and rooted in individuals’ early years.
He fled to Britain with his family after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 and died shortly afterwards in 1939.
