The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, was the home of Sigmund Freud and his family when they escaped Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. It remained the family home until Anna Freud, the youngest daughter, died in 1982. The centrepiece of the museum is Freud's study, preserved just as it was during his lifetime. The Freud Museum commemorates and elucidates the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud and maintains their working environment.
The museum is open to the public Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00 - 17:00. It also organizes research and publication programmes and it has an education service which organizes seminars, conferences and special visits to the museum. The museum is a member of the London Museums of Health & Medicine.
There are two other Freud Museums, one in Vienna, and another which has recently opened in Příbor, Czech Republic, in the house where Sigmund Freud was born. The latter was opened by president Václav Klaus and four of Freuďs great-grandsons.
The study and library at Maresfield Road in London were preserved by Anna Freud after her father's death. The bookshelf behind Freud's desk contains some of his favourite authors: not only Goethe and Shakespeare but also Heine, Multatuli and Anatole France. Freud acknowledged that poets and philosophers had gained insights into the unconscious which psychoanalysis sought to explain systematically. In addition to the books, the library contains various pictures hung as Freud arranged them; these include 'Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx' and 'The Lesson of Dr Charcot' plus photographs of Martha Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Yvette Guilbert, Marie Bonaparte, and Ernst von Fleischl.
The room contains the original analytic couch brought from Berggasse 19 on which patients would recline comfortably while Freud, out of sight in the green tub chair, listened to their 'free association.' They were asked to say everything that came to mind without consciously sifting or selecting information. This method became a foundation upon which psychoanalysis was built.
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