Past Exhibitions
From the Sigmund Freud Museum Collection
10 July - 02 December 2007
05 February - 21 September 2008 at the Sigmund Freud Museum
The presentation takes visitors into the archive and the library of the Sigmund Freud Museum. Pictures, writings and objects, which until now have been stored away out of sight, are on display for the first time, providing an overview of collecting activity at the institution housed in the rooms where Sigmund Freud lived and worked. The presentation serves to provide visitors with a view into the museum's "back stage". In this way it closes gaps in the permanent exhibition, but simultaneously it makes them visible anew.
Additionally, it also poses fundamental questions regarding the archivability of knowledge and the Freudian perspective on collecting, reading, and documenting. On the one hand, Freud had little faith in archives: in his psychoanalytic theory they are frequently described as sites of censorship. On the other hand, his work made him an object of public interest, and thus Freud himself became an object to be collected.
First editions and corrected manuscripts from Sigmund Freud are shown alongside works from psychoanalysts such as Richard Sterba, whose emigration to the USA forced him to discontinue work on his Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Many private photos and writings from Anna Freud, who also lived at Berggasse 19 and conducted analyses there, are on view as well.
The Sigmund Freud Museum library developed around a gift made by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter. It was especially important to her that a library and a research center be established. Thus she left a part of her library to the museum and started an international effort encouraging psychoanalysts to donate books as well.
Another section of the exhibition shows the papers and collections of Margarethe Trautenegg, née Csonka. Many of the images in the archive are private photographs that reflect the biographical experiences of their former owners. Trautenegg was sent to Freud on account of her homosexual inclinations. His discussion of her in "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" (1920) displays a remarkably liberal attitude. The exhibition also features numerous items from the papers and collections of Eva Rosenfeld (1892-1977), which the Sigmund Freud Foundation acquired in 2002.