The Freud Museum now
is in the house that
Sigmund Freud and his family settled in
when they came to London in 1938.
The year that Sigmund Freud spent here
was actually a very busy and active year.
This was despite the fact that he was
a very old man: he was in his 80s
and he was in poor health.
But despite that, he was extremely busy.
He was writing,
he was seeing a few patients,
and he was receiving a huge number of visitors.
When Sigmund Freud came to London,
he was something of a celebrity.
I think the importance of Freud is that
he introduced a radical new way of thinking
about what it means to be human.
A new view of the human being
emerges through Freud's work.
There's a historian who said that
the 20th Century human being was
born on Freud's couch,
which is a nice way of looking at
Freud's importance today.
One of the things that many people are
surprised by about Sigmund Freud,
or maybe don't know until they come here and
they see Sigmund Freud's study,
is what an extraordinary collector he was.
Many of his patients described Freud
as being like a curator in his own museum
and he himself made some comparisons
between psychoanalysis and archaeology:
that both were about digging down,
about finding layers of meaning.
Psychoanalysis is a theory of how the mind works.
It's also a method of helping people who are
going through difficulties in their lives,
and so it's very much a living subject
and as a museum we're on the one hand
tending to a historic collection,
but we're also tending to something
that's very much a contemporary practice.
The visitors that arrive here
on a day-to-day basis
range from being people who are working
in the field already of psychoanalysis
or are interested in psychology,
those who are studying it.
And on the other end of that spectrum
are people who are just culture-seekers,
people who have heard of Freud
and maybe want to see his famous couch
that sits in the study downstairs.
Other large groups that we see are students
who are here for educational tours
around the museum.
And all of these things mixed together are
such a fascinating amalgamation of minds.
The museum seems to have
a strange capacity to bring about
quite strong emotional reactions in people,
so some people,
when they come to the house
and they see the couch,
they burst into tears.
Some people feel this sense of
pins and needles or something like that,
some people really feel like
the hair on the back of their neck
is starting to stand up.
It's a very atmospheric
and a very evocative space.
People often say: 'well it feels as if
Freud is still there or as if he's
just left the room.'
And for some people coming here,
especially we have a lot of overseas visitors,
in fact more than half of our visitors
come from overseas,
the experience can be a little bit
akin to a pilgrimage.
It's very intense.
It's a small one, but it's a very...
you almost feel like there has been
someone just there in the last half a day,
or it looks like he was working here yesterday.
The experience of coming here
is very interesting: it's quite low-key,
it looks like a residential house
when you come in,
so that's quite fun, it doesn't look
too much like a museum.
It has a very different kind of feeling to
when you visit other museums
because you are visiting someone's
previous home, and it has this homely feeling
and you see the life,
and it's very informative as well.
My favourite thing?
I think the room where there is the sofa
because it was where the people
go there to speak.
You can almost feel that Freud is there
and that's what I came for. I've got that.
Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna,
she was a child analyst
and she continued living in this house
until her own death in 1982.
She was keen that after she died
the house should become a museum.
The museum has a very active public programme
which is about both education and learning
so we have a great many school groups,
particularly A-Level Psychology students
coming here.
It's about a very active events programme
so talks, conferences, films, performances,
evening classes and so on.
A lot of student visitors,
when they come through the door, we ask them
what do they think about Freud?
What do they think about psychoanalysis?
And they sort of say: 'it's weird'.
And, you know,
it is!
So we're not trying to convince students
that it's not weird.
We're trying to perhaps
get them to engage with that weirdness
of psychoanalysis,
and perhaps generalise that
into something that's
very weird about human beings.