Subnostr

“I must always have an object to love,” he confessed to Carl Jung. Freud even took his “old and grubby gods,” as he called them, on holiday with him. “I have sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities,” he wrote to the novelist Stefan Zweig, adding that he had “actually read more archaeology than psychology. On March 22nd, the Gestapo arrested Freud’s daughter Anna and carted her away for interrogation. She returned home unharmed, but the ordeal confirmed the family’s need to flee. A network of international supporters began scheming to get Freud out of Austria. Would his beloved collection make it with him? While the Gestapo waited outside his apartment, Freud’s friend and pupil Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon, smuggled out two of his favorite objects—a small bronze statuette of Athena and a Chinese jade screen—by stashing them in her handbag.” Freud, the Antique Collector https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/freud-the-antique-collector

Katrin 2y ago

“I studied a glass case displaying Freud’s collection of tiny penis amulets. He had seventeen phalluses but only one vulva.

“Who do you think dusted them all?” a psychotherapist near me asked. The answer, in fact, is his housekeeper, Paula Fichtl, who tended to Freud’s treasures for some fifty years.

Freud began collecting in 1896, shortly after the death of his father. “In [my] inner self,” he reflected, “I now feel quite uprooted.” Around the same time, he began his self-analysis, digging into his unconscious in the work that would become “The Interpretations of Dreams.”

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Katrin 2y ago

“Freud took pleasure in showing H.D. his objects, but she wasn’t sure if this was a social gesture or part of his analytic plan. “Did he want to find out how I would react to certain ideas embodied in these little statues, or how deeply I felt the dynamic idea still implicit in spite of the fact that ages or aeons of time had flown over many of them?” she reflected. “Or did he mean simply to imply that he wanted to share his treasures with me, those tangible shapes before us that yet suggested the intangible and vastly more fascinating treasures of his own mind?” Freud, the Antique Collector https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/freud-the-antique-collector