Freud, Berggasse 19

The permanent exhibition in Freud’s living quarters and practice rooms presents the life and work of Sigmund and Anna Freud, as well as biographical details concerning the family history. The  rooms are kept in their original layouts, thus offering an authentic experience of the birthplace of psychoanalysis. Numerous exhibits—such as objects that used to belong to the family, original manuscripts, and photographs—illustrate the stages of Freud’s career and personal biography.

Sigmund Freud’s Practice

Fascinating insights into the genesis of Freud’s theoretical work are provided by rare first editions and valuable presentation copies in Freud’s practice. Translations into numerous languages testify to the early international dissemination of psychoanalysis. The display in Freud’s treatment room focuses on the practice of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” by referring to his case histories and texts. The place where the famous couch once stood remains empty—it was an intentional decision not to reconstruct the original interior, as Director Monika Pessler explains: “The empty space left in Freud’s treatment room since his escape from the Nazis is an explicit reference to the dark course of history. Recreating a World of Yesterday (Stefan Zweig) in these rooms—a world before Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany in March 1938—as if Freud hadn’t been forced into exile in London, would be to negate an important part of his history and indeed our history, too.”

The history of the absent couch is told in an AR installation that can be accessed on-site in the treatment room. It enables the couch to temporarily return to its original position as a virtual 3D image on visitors’ smartphones.

Select photographs of the rooms at Berggasse 19 bravely and skillfully taken by Edmund Engelman in May 1938, despite being under surveillance by the Gestapo, give some indication of the rooms’ original furnishings before the Freud family fled the country that same year.

Anna Freud's rooms

Anna Freud’s adjacent living and practice rooms are dedicated to her work of combining psychoanalysis and pedagogy, which she performed together with her partner Dorothy Burlingham in Vienna and, after their emigration, in London. Anna Freud supported the establishment of the museum in the early 1970s and donated among other things the furnishings of the waiting room, which now looks as it did back in Freud’s day.

The Freud family's apartment

The private rooms of the Freud family are dedicated to Freud’s life as a family man and to his early career as a newly qualified doctor and neurologist. Objects like hospital documents and medical instruments testify to his time as a young physician; his travel toiletry kit, gifts to his wife Martha, and other personal objects provide information about his family life and “set in motion imaginations, associations, and narratives,” says Daniela Finzi, the museum’s research director. This is also where texts and manuscripts owned by the family are shared with the public. The Interpretation of Dreams is the centerpiece of the former bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Freud. Through audio exhibits, read out by Philippe Sands and Birgit Minichmayr, visitors can learn about Sigmund Freud’s dreams in the place where they happened. A special insight into the Freuds’ everyday family life is provided by the unique home videos commentated by Anna Freud. They were recorded in the 1930s—chiefly by Marie Bonaparte, a close friend of the family—and are shown in the former kitchenette.

In the so-called Herrenzimmer (gentlemen’s salon), objects belonging to the family - an intarsia table, a painting, and a box of games—have returned to their original positions.

The rooms previously reserved for social gatherings - the Freuds’ dining room and Minna Bernays’s salon - are now used for temporary exhibitions, ranging from artistic to cultural-historical explorations, and observations.

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Concept and Design: Atelier Czech/Hermann Czech and Gerhard Flora
Curators: Sigmund Freud Museum/Monika Pessler and Daniela Finzi

Hidden Thoughts of a Visual Nature

Freud maintained his practice in the "medical apartment" on the upper ground floor of the building from 1896 to 1906. Now the permanent exhibition "Hidden Thoughts of a Visual Nature" can be seen there - a presentation of selected works from the Sigmund Freud Museum's conceptual art collection, which was established in 1989 with an installation by the American artist Joseph Kosuth. Twelve artworks by John Baldessari, Wolfgang Berkowski, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jessica Diamond, Georg Herold, Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Joseph Kosuth, Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach, Franz West, and Heimo Zobernig are on display in the premises of Freud's "first" practice.

The pieces of Joseph Kosuth and Heimo Zobernig are shown in the former waiting room, which served as a meeting place for the famous Wednesday Psychological Society from 1902 onwards. Kosuth's wall installation encourages the integration of new thoughts into the existing material. In Zobernig’s work, the structural similarity between vision and reality becomes the subject of artistic scrutiny.

In the little veranda, found objects and pieces of language become the protagonists of Sherrie Levine’s and Wolfgang Berkowski’s artistic narratives. In Freud’s former treatment room, works of visual art incorporate core themes from the field of psychological investigation: Georg Herold addresses the question «whether our ‹civilized› sexual morality is worth the sacrifice which it imposes on us» with critical wit. With an «AHA!» Haim Steinbach draws attention to communication in the course of the psychoanalytic therapy in his reference to the talking cure —the foundation of all talking therapy even today. For John Baldessari, photographic references form a starting point for his visualization of the affinity and the discrepancy of the un-canny. Susan Hiller tests the idea of «seeing oneself in others» in her extensive study of the archival materials from Freud's estate. In the center, Franz West's "Liège" is set up. Where Freud's couch presumably stood, its crudely welded counterpart now rises on a white pedestal, less an invitation to linger than a reference to the instrumental character of the psychoanalytic setting.

In the room in which Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, Jessica Diamond’s piece "Me-constellation", both self- and other-referential, is presented. Ilya Kabakov’s installation, based on items of furniture found at Berggasse 19, unfolds its symbolism in the place where Sigmund Freud’s desk once stood, underscoring the room’s erstwhile purpose, and adding the fantastic autobiographical story "The Man Who Flew Into His Picture".

Positioned on the wall of the former kitchen of Freud’s practice, through which it was possible to leave discreetly after the psychoanalytic session, Pier Paolo Calzolari presents "Avido" (greed), a piece that highlights sexual desire.

The preserved architectural elements of Freud’s former workplace not only define the birthplace of psychoanalysis. Major ideas that Freud once tested and formulated here coincide with those of the works on display: Questions about the relationship between the sexes are raised as a theme, as is the possible discrepancy between what is experienced and what is remembered, or between individual and social (self-)determination. The close, interdependent relationship between art and the surrounding space differs significantly here from the criteria of the neutrally designed "white cube" usually favored for the presentation of contemporary art - since the works of art corresponding in and with Freud's former workplace and all its historical implications merge in this site with their surroundings to form a unity of effect.

Concept: Monika Pessler

Olaf Nicolai: Trauer und Melancholie (Mourning and Melancholia)

Olaf Nicolai's work "Trauer und Melancholie" (Mourning and Melancholia) was presented in the Sigmund Freud Museum's "Library of Psychoanalysis" on the 82nd anniversary of Sigmund Freud's death. With his artistic documentation (2009/12), Nicolai made possible the first translation of Freud's eponymous writing from German into Arabic. In addition to the presentation of the publications (de/en), his concept also includes the presentation of the text as a radio play, which was produced by the radio station Amwaj 91.5 FM in 2009 and broadcast as a reading lasting several hours as part of the Ramallah Biennial.

As an integral part of the installation, film recordings of the preparatory conversation between the radio speaker and the translator Mohammad Abu-Zaid convey the complexity of this undertaking, which is due not least to the differences between the respective (language) cultures. Thus, the artistic translation performance not only "speaks" insights into various states of mourning in the literal sense, but above all places interpersonal dialogue at the center of consideration - that is, the procedure that is just as inscribed in psychoanalysis as it is in humanitarian attempts to clarify and resolve the Middle East conflict.

The work is accessible upon request.

Made possible by the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts.

Ermöglicht durch die Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste.

Documents of Injustice. The Case of Freud

October 24, 2025 - November 9, 2026 at the Sigmund Freud Museum

The upcoming special exhibition “Documents of Injustice. The Case of Freud,” recounts the final months of the Freud family in Nazi occupied Vienna. It depicts the plundering of Sigmund Freud and his brother Alexander, the disenfranchisement of the entire family, and the murder of his sisters who remained in Vienna. A central element of the exhibition are previously unpublished court documents: files from the post-war trial of the “provisional administrator” of Sigmund Freud's estate, who had been appointed by the Nazis. Thanks to these records and with the help of other original documents from the Nazi era that have never been shown before, it is possible to trace how Freud and his family were systematically and meticulously robbed and deprived of their rights. The story of the Freud family illustrates the systematic nature of the totalitarian and perfidious Nazi administration, while at the same time recounting the personal fates of family members—from their efforts to go into exile themselves to their desperate attempts to save the lives of their close relatives. The fates of the family members in Vienna and in exile are traced through personal records of Freud's sisters and oral history interviews with Viennese women who cared for the elderly women.

SURREAL! Imagining New Realities

Until April 10, 2023, the special exhibition "SURREAL! Imagining New Realities" at the Sigmund Freud Museum explores the tense relationship between psychoanalysis and surrealism. Approximately 100 works from the fields of painting, photography, and literature illustrate the references of the artistic avant-garde to the science of the unconscious using various thematic perspectives and including works by (among others) Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Conroy Maddox, André Masson, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Savinio, Toyen (Marie Čermínová), and Dorothea Tanning.

The comprehensive and multi-layered examination of Surrealism at the birthplace of psychoanalysis is made possible by the generous loan of art collector and former gallery owner Helmut Klewan and supplemented by selected exhibits from other lenders.

Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality“ - this is André Breton's famous confession, which he put down in his "Manifeste du Surréalisme" in 1924. Breton calls for the expansion of the reason-based approach to human life's realities to include the unconscious as well as a rapturous, libidinal, and dreamlike experience. In fact, Freud's insights into the functions of the "psychic apparatus" gained importance in the works of the Surrealists from the mid-1920s onward - especially those forces that elude psychic control and censorship.

"SURREAL! Imagining New Realities" describes the interrelations between the art form founded by Breton and psychoanalysis, which, with all its shifts, condensations, and productive misunderstandings, so significantly determined the development of the Surrealist movement.

The exhibition is curated by Monika Pessler and Daniela Finzi (Sigmund Freud Museum)