Everyday Life in Exile

On June 4, 1938, Sigmund, Martha, and Anna Freud are able to leave Vienna on the Orient Express. After a short stopover in Paris, they reach London on June 6. At first, they are put up in Elsworthy Road in the wealthy residential quarter of Hampstead, where Freud has the great honor of being visited by three representatives of the Royal Society. In September 1938, he undergoes surgery to remove a tumor: his Viennese doctor Hans Pichler flies in especially for the occasion—Freud’s last operation. After returning from the London Clinic, he moves into the house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which has been converted by his son Ernst and which the family calls the «London Berggasse.»
Here, he finishes his work Moses and Monotheism, while his final work— An Outline of Psychoanalysis —remains unfinished. He receives guests including Salvador Dali, Arnold Zweig, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, as well as four regular analysands and Dorothy Burlingham for her training analysis.