Sigmund Freud and China, an Exhibition

The important part which the collecting of antiquities played in the life of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is central to most understandings of the founder of psychoanalysis. There have been numerous books, articles, and scholarly gatherings which focus on this aspect of him as a man and as a thinker. However, Freud's relationship with objects from China is a topic which has perhaps been rather overlooked in favour of his more explicitly avowed interest in ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. A new exhibition, “Sigmund Freud and China”, will open in January 2022 at the Freud Museum London, Freud's home in exile for the last year of his life. The exhibit, supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, will, for the first time, focus on this aspect of his life, as well as on the wider theme of his ideas about China and its culture.

Although the Chinese objects in Freud's antiquities collection—as it survives in the Freud Museum London today—are a minority of all the pieces he owned, their considerable significance to him, especially towards the end of his long life, must be acknowledged in any full accounting of his interests. Chinese objects occupied prominent positions in the interiors he inhabited, so that any visitor to Freud's consulting room or study in the 1930s could not have failed to be aware of them. As photographs of Freud's living and working environment in Vienna clearly show, a patient then on the famous psychoanalytic couch had in their line of vision a group of three Chinese earthenware figures, still in the collection today. The objects, literally right in front of Freud's own line of vision as he sat at his desk, included numerous Chinese pieces, one of them—a dark green jade table screen, so precious to him that it was one of only two pieces smuggled out of his Vienna apartment at the moment when it seemed possible the Nazi regime might seize the whole collection.

And yet there is a puzzle at the heart of Freud's collection of Chinese objects. His large