Freud Museum London

📸 Photograph of Sigmund Freud's study with flowers at 20 Maresfield Gardens, taken in 1975.

Join us this summer to visit Freud's house and explore our new exhibitions The Sight of Something, running until 19th October, and Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable, closing on 29th June.

Join us for Uncanny Shakespeare: Distance and Reconciliation in ‘Pericles’.

Shakespeare’s underperformed late play, Pericles, is the subject of this summer’s theatre workshop with the Faction and Bournemouth University’s CESJ. Inspired by Freud’s fascination for Shakespeare and following the success of our 2023 event on the topic of shame in Macbeth, this workshop will address the theme of displacement, both in terms of geography and language.

🗓️ 12 June, 6 - 8pm

More information and tickets: https://ow.ly/YkAc50W2ut4

🖼️ A Major Exhibition is Opening at the Freud Museum

This summer, the Freud Museum presents the work of Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir, two contemporary artists who reveal how our understanding of the past is continually shaped and reshaped by unconscious processes.

Drawing on the great works of art history, both artists create intricate paintings that echo the way memories are formed. Layered, altered and meticulously constructed, their images are determined as much by absence and forgetting as by what is seen and remembered.

As Sigmund Freud observed, memory traces are not literal records of past events but are partial, distorted reconstructions governed by later experiences.

For more information: https://ow.ly/EwYG50W1H8G

Exhibition Dates: June 4 – October 19, 2025

Many of the books in Freud's library include handwritten dedications. The majority of dedications in the front of books come from the authors themselves. They gifted Freud their newest publication, complete with an affectionate inscription, in the hopes that their work would sit on Freud’s library shelves.

Anna Freud, Sigmund’s youngest daughter and only child to follow him into psychoanalysis, dedicated many of her published works to her father. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence” (1936) was a major work by Anna Freud. On her father’s 80th birthday Anna gave him a copy inscribed:

“Writing books as the supreme defence against all dangers from within and without.”

📸 Marie Bonaparte – Edgar Poe
Handwritten dedication by Bonaparte to Freud

📸 Otto Rank – The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
Handwritten dedication by Rank to Freud

📸 Jakob Freud – Family Bible – 19th century
Handwritten letter from Freud’s father to young Sigmund

📸 Freud's library in his study at the Freud Museum London

You can read more on our website: https://ow.ly/PZTp50VX529

With the opening of Tracing the Irretraceable, now on at the Freud Museum London, let’s take a look at some of the objects on Freud’s desk 📸

🚬 Cigar box with a hinged lid, adorned with a relief map of France in copper

🪨 Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray

🦔 Metal figure of a porcupine with quills, made by the Franz Bergman factory in Vienna, likely by the artist Karl Fuhrmann

🦁 Bronze Luristan standard finial showing a man restraining two lion-like animals facing outward — Iranian

🪷 White ivory detailed carving of Vishnu seated under the five-headed cobra Sesha, Sanskrit dedication to Freud on a brass plaque attached to the sandalwood base.

You can visit the museum and see Freud’s favourite ashtray, reimagined by Holly Stevenson through her ceramic sculptures, as part of Tracing the Irretraceable — an intimate exhibition exploring the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis to Stevenson, in dialogue with the Freud Museum collection and the collection of the late Jane McAdam Freud.

Join us for PROJECTIONS: Lynchian Women, an online lecture with Mary Wild

David Lynch’s women are unforgettable: luminous beings who radiate beauty, vulnerability, danger, and a certain ethereal quality.

With Lynch’s passing, this talk will celebrate his enduring legacy by focusing on the mysterious female figures who define a unique artistic world.

Through a psychoanalytic framework, we will uncover layers of meaning and interpret Lynch’s perplexing depictions of femininity via concepts including psychogenic fugue, the double, jouissance (a warped, nightmarish pleasure found in pain and excess), the uncanny, and the sublime.

🗓️ 5 June, 6:00 pm - 8pm

For more information an ticket booking: https://ow.ly/snM250VWv2b

PROJECTIONS: Lynchian Women - Freud Museum London All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to

This week is the UK , with the theme of community. We, at the Freud Museum London, are dedicated to education and outreach programmes for the wider community of mental health users and workers.

Explore our programmes and bring your group to the Freud Museum!
https://ow.ly/IM0550VUpcM

Curious to know more about Freud's insights into group psychology? You can now listen to recordings from our past marathon readings of Freud’s major works dedicated to these topics:

Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
https://ow.ly/pYhk50VUpcK

Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents:
https://ow.ly/oss350VUpcJ

📸 Group statuette of seven Luristan figures, bronze, Iranian. From Sigmund Freud’s personal collection.

📸 Free-associative mixed-media collages made during a community visit, using materials including leaves and petals from Freud's garden.

In our series ‘Psychoanalysis and Opera’, Sara Collins will preset some psychoanalytical insights on the opera Eugene Onegin.

The talk will be accompanied by clips from the opera and followed by discussion and comments from the audience.

In each presentation Sara examines dramatic emotional narratives of opera through the lens of contemporary psychoanalysis. She reflects on the inner lives of legendary dramatic characters, and what might unconsciously motivate their actions and fatal decisions.

📅 Sunday 11th May 3:00-4:30 pm.

Book your tickets: https://ow.ly/qMlz50VQcYO.

Psychoanalysis and Opera Series - Freud Museum London Psychoanalysis and Opera In our series ‘Psychoanalysis and Opera’, Sara Collins presents psychological insights into opera. She examines its