The Freud Museum

I visited the Freud museum unsure about what I was going to find. I knew hardly anything about Sigmund and his daughter Anna Freud except that his house (The Freud Museum) was the place where psychoanalysis was born.
Sigmund was a refugee from the Nazis and came to England. Sigmund refused to leave his Jewish psychoanalytical community in Germany, until Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938.
Sigmund only lived in this house for a year, he moved in on 27th September 1938 and stayed ther until his death on 23rd September 1939 at the age of 83. His daughter Anna continued to live there until 1982 when she died, that is when her wish to turn the house into a museum was granted and opened to the public in July 1986.
The museum holds a range of objects including the library, their personal papers and photograph albums, it also holds Sigmunds collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Oriental antiquities. The most well known object which I saw was the couch on which psychoanalysis was apparently born. The museum has two floors and a conservatory.
The ground floor is made up of a dining room, entrance hall and a study and library. The conservatory is the museum shop. The dining room contains painted Austrian furniture which belonged to Anna Freud and originally came from her country cottage back in Austria. There are also paintings of some of the places where Sigmund spent holidays. The study for me was the most interesting of rooms as it was preserved exactly as it was when Sigmund died. It contains the the reknowned couch on which his patients lay. He would ask them to say everything which came to mind without thinking or selecting specific information to tell Sigmund. I personally found this a scary thought, I woulnt particularly like somebody to know exactly what my thoughts were. The study also had the antiquities I mentioned earlier. The library in the study was full of books, obviously but they included a range of subjects inluding: art, literature, archaeology, philosophy and history as well as psychology, medicine and psychoanalysis. Everything was barriered so we couldnt have a close look at the objects.
The first floor had an exhibition room, video room and the Anna Freud room. The Anna Freud room was my favourite room as it showed personal aspects of her character which I thought was quite interesting. I discovered that Anna was a keen weaver and knitting enthusiast. There was a loom from her bedroom and her own analytic couch within the room.
The strangest part of my visit to the museum was when I went into the video room and watched a homemade film of how the Freud family moved from Vienna to London, it included a clip of Sigmund on his birthday with a cigar in his mouth. He himself suffered from cancer of the palate for the last 16 years of his life. The weird part was when the man who gave us an introduction to the museum asked us a question in which none of us understood clearly, it was about thoughts or something. I was scared he was going to ask me about the whole psychology of the rooms and objects shown in the museum because I wouldn't of known the answer. When nobody in the room answered his question he got really angry and walked out of the room, saying he was going to pull off his fingernails and come back in and show us. I was slightly worried about this thought and decided to leave as quickly as I could after the video had ended.
The experience has made me think about reading one of the many books Sigmund has written, the one interesting me is about the interpretation of dreams.