Spotlight on the Archives: Who has contributed to the Freud Museum?

The recent re-cataloguing of the Freud Museum London archives has shone a spotlight on a number of lesser-known figures. Here we explore some of those people, their lives and their contributions.

 

Lucie Freud

Lucie Brasch was born in 1896, the daughter and heiress of the wealthy merchant Joseph Brasch and his wife Elise. She studied classical philology and art history in Munich, where she met the architecture student Ernst Freud, Sigmund’s youngest son. The couple married on 18 May 1920 and lived in Berlin until 1933, when they fled to London. Lucie had three sons with Ernst: Stephen Gabriel Freud (b. 1921), Lucian Freud (named for his mother) (b. 1922) and Clement Freud (b. 1924). She died in 1989.

The Lucie Freud Collection contains letters between Lucie and her husband Ernst, letters from Lucian, Clement and Stephen Freud as children, family correspondence from Sigmund and Martha Freud, and photographs of the family.

Walter Freud

Walter Freud was the son of Martin Freud and grandson of Sigmund Freud. Born in Vienna he fled the Nazis in 1938 with his father, as did Sigmund and Anna Freud and many others of the Freud family. Walter and his father were interned in England as an enemy alien in 1940 and deported to Australia later that year. Returning to England in 1941, he joined first the Royal Pioneer Corps and later the Special Operations Executive. After the war Freud investigated the Nazi’s war crimes in the War Crimes Investigation Unit. He married Annette Krarup in 1946 and gained a degree in Chemical engineering the next year. Freud worked in what would become BP Chemicals until his retirement in 1977, and died in 2004.

The Walter Freud Collection was donated in 2004. It mostly contains letters and documents relating to his father, Martin Freud, and grandfather, Sigmund Freud.

Betty Lambda

Betty Lambda, nee Percheron and then Paul, was born in London, England, in 1921. She began acting aged 15 and went on to work in theatre, radio, television and films from the 1940s. She adopted her stage name Betty Paul in 1944. After marrying her third husband Peter Lambda in 1958 the pair collaborated on many successful television scripts, whilst Betty Lambda herself wrote for the theatre and radio as well as two novels. Betty died in Gloucestershire in 2011.

Betty Lambda donated this collection to the museum in 2001. It contains correspondence from Sigmund and Anna Freud, Kata and Lajos Lévy, and a case history of Sigmund Freud’s medical treatment.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl initially studied poetry under the poet Muriel Rukeyser, but after interrupting these studies he gained her undergraduate degree at The New School for Social Research in New York. She would later meet Hannah Arendt during her PhD studies. Arendt was Young-Bruehl’s PhD supervisor as well as her mentor, and after Arendt’s passing it was Young-Bruehl that wrote her biography in 1982.

Training to become a psychoanalyst in New Haven in the 1980s, Young-Bruehl would meet many of Anna Freud’s colleagues: asked once again to write a biography, she published Anna Freud: A Biography in 1998. She completed her training the following year, graduating from the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis. Young-Bruehl practiced as an analyst until 2011, when she died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. She had continued to write, publishing works such as Where Do We Fall When We Fall in Love? (2003) and Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children (2012).

The Elisabeth Young-Bruehl  archive is related to her writing of a biography of Anna Freud, published by Summit Books, New York, in 1988. The archive contains documents relating to Anna Freud and correspondence from Manna Friedmann.