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The travelling exhibition of The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past gives us a unique opportunity to examine Freud's interest in the arts, the relationship between the arts and psychoanalysis, the cultural context in which Freud formed his thought, the psychology of collecting, the link with clinical practice, and the unique objects themselves.
Freud had an intense and abiding interest in art. He believed firmly that the insights of the creative writer were in many ways equivalent, if not superior, to those of the scientist; the artist could understand human experience in ways that the scientist could not. Freud often bemoaned the labor and time involved in arriving at the psychological understanding that seemed to come intuitively to the creative artist. Freud himself had something of the creative artist about him although he tended to disparage remarks that psychoanalysis itself was a form of art. The only major award he received during his lifetime was a literary one, the Goethe Prize, granted in 1930.
Freud loved to read the great works of literature by Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Schiller and wrote on literary and artistic subjects throughout his life. He wrote a psychoanalytic biography of Leonardo da Vinci, he offered a detailed analysis of the Moses statue of Michelangelo, and he often commented on Shakespeare's characters, such as Hamlet and Lady Macbeth. He named a critical emotional experience of early life the oedipus complex, with Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex and Rex and Greek mythology in mind.
Freud began to collect art and antiquities in the late 1890s; his collection consisted primarily of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figures. He turned to collecting in the heyday of major archaeological excavations; the year that Freud entered medical school, 1873, was the year of