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An obscure exhibit in University College London, Jeremy Bentham's AutoIcon, epitomizes a prevailing idea of the museum's function. It is a corpse on display. Bentham's original intention was that visitors should be able to shake his hand after his death so that contact could be maintained between the dead and the living. Meanwhile, one of London's greatest tourist attractions continues to be the ‘living corpses’ at Madame Tussaud's. As for the nearby counter-attraction of the British Museum, for all its vast wealth of culture and art it is the Egyptian mummies and the famous peat-bog corpse (‘Pete Marsh’) that are among the most popular items with visitors.
The Freud Museum in Hampstead is unlikely ever to have as many visitors as Madame Tussaud's or the British Museum. For one thing it has no corpse: Freud made sure that he was cremated. In 1909, when he visited Bremen on his way to the USA, he saw the mummified corpses of humans and animals preserved by the dry atmosphere of the Bleikeller beneath the cathedral. That sight moved Freud to comment:
The whole thing remains a plea for the thorough annihilation by fire of the person that has become superfluous. (Reisejournal, 21 August 1909)
When the forms of death imitate life, it inspires disquiet and unease. The person, being dead, has become ‘superfluous’ and yet their (now unnecessary) body continues to clutter the world of the living. What are they ‘doing’ here? They have degenerated into pure representation without sense or sensitivity and because of that the viewer experiences an uncanny reaction; self-congratulation on still being alive, perhaps, but blended with a frisson of existential anguish.
The Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead is the house in which Freud died. It remained in the family's possession until his last surviving child, Anna, died in 1982, bequeathing it to a trust in order to found a museum commemorating her father and his work. This Museum, then, is founded on deaths; it could n