The Sigmund Freud Museum - Summer 2009

By Hashim Bhattee

Nestled among the grand homes of a street in Hampstead was a quaint old home. Almond blossom embroidered the front portal and the ponderously large windows. Two small blue enamelled plaques adorned the simple red brickwork detailing two of the house’s previous inhabitants. The inside of the house smelled sweetly of book-binding resin, not uncommon in the homes of our grandparents. The papers that hung from the walls were simple colours, soft to the eyes, and the furnishing antique and tasteful.

We were greeted as if guests of Sigmund Freud and his family himself, as humbly and with as much hospitality as one would expect Freud to have displayed. At this point, in the home of a great intellectual, one would assume there would be areas roped off and great scrolled writings of the man himself. However, here we were handed audio cassette players and encouraged to discover individually. At this point most of us in attendance had forgotten that this was the home of the man that claimed that all dreams were sexual in nature and that we all at some point sought to murder our fathers and fornicate with our mothers.

Among the various works that Freud had come to create and the musings of his latest investigations were collections of various things; pottery, glasses of spirits, flowers and antiquities. Quite strange when this was a museum devoted to the pioneer in psychoanalysis and the study of the deepest desires of men; desires that eluded even his own notice. As one mounted the stairs, he (or at least I) imagined the booming laughter of a man who enjoyed his jokes, his food and most notably his life, not that of a man who many claimed was an obsessed maniac who chanced across his discoveries through plain luck.

The pleasant atmosphere of the home of the Freud family displayed in the short clip of home videos, narrated by Anna Freud herself, only compelled us more to realise that Freud was not the drug-using crackpot who some led us to believe he was; or at least not all of the time.
Freud’s study, with walls adorned with various trinkets from civilisations long forgotten, very much reflected the haphazard state of mankind which must have aided Freud in his adventure into the vast caverns of the human mind. The various trinkets with the opulent carpets and the luxurious couch, for which Freud is well remembered, also imbued the room with a sense of comfort. This study, if nothing else, taught us how our surroundings can often help us orientate our train of thought as much as any other method.

A game of word-association football (although not to the taste of all of us who were present) took place in the garden in which we had seen Freud enjoy his final birthday among his large family. It was enjoyed due to the familiarity that we felt towards the house and the grounds - despite never having known anyone who had lived here and despite the fact that this was the first time that any of us had visited the museum. As time went on the sense of familiarity grew stronger; to be completely honest I felt odd, it reminded me far too much of the home of my grandparents and forced me to become familiar with people whom I barely knew by first name.

Upon leaving the home of Sigmund Freud, the strange sense of familiarity was not lost upon us, if nothing else, we learned of an experience that nowadays seems very rare and one which I am happy I can experience with a simple trip to see my grandparents. However through the writings of Freud, with honesty entrenched in every word of every sentence, we learned how the creative process by which Freud came to his conclusions develops; and how the fact that his writings lie in his home unmolested enhance the effect tremendously.