It was in this house that Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life. He moved in on 27 September 1938 and remained here until his death at the age of 83 on 23 September 1939. His wife Martha and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays together with his daughter Anna and their housemaid Paula Fichtl continued living in the house, and later Anna’s friend Dorothy Burlingham also moved in. The house remained occupied until the death of Anna Freud in 1982. In accordance with her wishes, it was turned into a museum after her death and opened to the public in July 1986.

Freud  came  to  London  a  refugee  from the Nazis.  In Germany the works of Freud and fellow psychoanalysts were publicly burned in 1933 and during the following years most members of the predominantly Jewish psychoanalytical community in Germany and Austria emigrated. However, Freud refused to leave; it was not until Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938 and the Freud family was subjected to Nazi harassment that he moved away from Berggasse 19, Vienna, his home of 47 years. On 6 June he arrived in London and moved into a rented house at 39, Elsworthy Road. On 27 September 1938 he finally moved into his own home at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Here his son Ernst and housekeeper Paula Fichtl recreated for him the same working environment as in Vienna.

For the last 16 years of his life Freud suffered from cancer of the palate. Yet he continued to work: in England he completed Moses and Monotheism and began his final unfinished work, Outline of Psychoanalysis. In addition, Freud maintained his practice and received a number of patients for analysis at Maresfield Gardens.
 

     FIRST FLOOR

The Anna Freud Room depicts aspects of her work and character. The room contains some furniture from her study (including her analytic couch) and a loom from her bedroom. Anna Freud was a keen weaver and a knitting enthusiast, this latter activity being one which she practiced during analyses of patients. She was born in 1895, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. In 1914 she began training as a primary school teacher but in 1918 she also began training as a lay psychoanalyst, receiving her own analysis from her father.However, Anna Freud’s short teaching career provided a basis for her pioneering work in the field of child psychology: her Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis  was published in 1927 and her influential The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence  appeared in 1936. From 1923 onwards she also became her father’s secretary and ambassador. An exhibit in the room illustrates Anna Freud’s life and work  in Vienna and London. She was assisted by Dorothy Burlingham, an analyst who lived at  20 Maresfield Gardens until her death in 1979.
The Landing  features two portraits of Sigmund Freud, one by Ferdinand Schmutzer, the other by Salvador Dali. Schmutzer’s original chalk and charcoal sketch was made in 1926 and an etching taken from it is now in the Library. Freud praised the portrait, writing in a letter of thanks to Schmutzer that  “it gives me great  pleasure and I should really thank you for the trouble you have taken in reproducing my ugly face, and I  repeat my assurance that only now do I feel myself preserved for posterity.”

Salvador Dali was introduced to Freud by Stefan Zweig on 19 July 1938 when Freud was still living in rented accomodation at 39 Elsworthy Road. During the encounter Dali executed a  sketch  surreptitiously and later made the pen and ink drawing exhibited in the museum. Neither the sketch nor the drawing were shown to Freud because Zweig felt they conveyed Freud’s imminent death.

     GROUND FLOOR

The Conservatory at the rear of the building was well used; it looks out onto the garden and has  a roof designed by Freud’s architect son, Ernst. At the front of this is the Dining Room containing painted Austrian peasant furniture which came from Anna Freud’s and Dorothy Burlingham’s country cottage at Hochrotherd in Austria. Also in the room is a souvenir painting of some of the alpine regions where Freud spent holidays, walking in the countryside he loved.

The Study and Library were preserved by Anna Freud after her father’s death. 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 psychoanalytic therapy was built.

The Study is also saturated with antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient. Freud visited many archaeological sites (though not Egypt) but most of the collection was acquired from dealers in Vienna. He confessed  that his passion for collecting was second in intensity only to his  addiction to cigars. Yet the importance of the collection is also evident in Freud’s use of archaeology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. One example of this is Freud’s explanation to a patient that conscious material ‘wears away’ while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: “I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said,  only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation.”

The library at  20 Maresfield Gardens contains all the books he chose to bring with him from Vienna. It covers a wide range of subjects: art, literature, archaeology, philosophy and history as well as psychology, medicine and psychoanalysis. The bookshelf behind Freud’s desk contains some of his favourite authors: not only Goethe and Shakespeare but also Flaubert, Heine 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 such as ‘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.

This house, where Freud completed his life and work, now offers a unique insight into the foundation of psychoanalysis.

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