Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna)

Museum

The building was newly built in 1891 when Freud moved there. The previous building on the site, once the home of Victor Adler, had been torn down.

His old rooms, where he lived for 47 years and produced the majority of his writings, now house a documentary centre to his life and works. The influence of psychoanalysis on art and society is displayed through a program of special exhibitions and a modern art collection.

The museum consists of Freud's former practice and a part of his old private quarters. Attached to the museum are Europe's largest psychoanalytic research library, with 35,000 volumes, and the research institute of the Sigmund Freud Foundation.

The display includes original items owned by Freud, the practice's waiting room, and parts of Freud's extensive antique collection. However, his famous couch is now in the Freud Museum in London, along with most of the original furnishings, as Freud was able to take his furniture with him when he emigrated:

The empty space left in Freud’s treatment room since his escape from the Nazis is an explicit reference to the dark course of history. Recreating a World of Yesterday (Stefan Zweig) in these rooms—a world before Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany in March 1938—as if Freud hadn’t been forced into exile in London, would be to negate an important part of his history and indeed our history, too.

— Museum Director Monika Pessler, "Permanent Exhibition," Sigmund Freud Museum

A third Freud Museum, after London and Vienna, was started in the Czech town of Příbor in 2006 when the house of his birth was opened to the public.

The museum contains an archive of images containing around two thousand documents, mostly photographs, but also paintings, drawings, and sculptures. The collection consists of almost all of the existing photos of Sigmund Freud and his family, a large number of photos of Anna Freud and photos from psychoanalytic congresses etc.