The Flight from Vienna
Sigmund Freud arrived in London on 6 June 1938, a week after being allowed to leave Vienna following the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was eighty-two years old, suffering from the oral cancer that had already required more than thirty operations, and accompanied by his daughter Anna, his wife Martha, several other members of his family, and his collection of antiquities. The Anschluss had made his position in Vienna untenable: despite the international pressure that had been brought to bear on the Nazi authorities by figures ranging from the American ambassador to Mussolini, Freud's departure had required the payment of a substantial "emigration tax" and considerable diplomatic effort by his supporters.
The choice of London as the destination for Freud's exile was not accidental. London had a significant psychoanalytic community — the British Psychoanalytical Society, founded in 1913, was one of the oldest and most distinguished in the world — and Freud's relationship with Britain went back decades. His works had been translated into English from an early date, and the British psychoanalytic community had maintained close connections with the Vienna circle throughout the interwar period. Ernest Jones, the Welsh psychoanalyst who was Freud's most trusted British colleague, had been instrumental in organising the arrangements for Freud's departure and arrival.
The family settled at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, a substantial Edwardian house that had been found for them by Jones and prepared by Anna Freud in advance of their arrival. The house was large enough to accommodate not only the family but also Freud's consulting room — which was recreated at Maresfield Gardens with the furniture, the famous couch, and the extensive collection of antiquities exactly as it had been in Vienna — and the offices and reception rooms that the continuing psychoanalytic practice required.
The Final Year
Freud's health had been declining for years before his arrival in London, and the last year of his life was conducted in the awareness that death was approaching. He continued to work throughout this period — finishing his final book, Moses and Monotheism, seeing selected patients and visitors, and maintaining the intellectual engagement that had characterised his entire life — with a combination of discipline and dignity that impressed all who observed it. The oral cancer had spread beyond the reach of the surgical interventions that had temporarily controlled it, and by the summer of 1939 Freud was in constant pain.
The visitors who came to Maresfield Gardens during Freud's final year included figures from across the intellectual and cultural world who wished to pay their respects to the founder of psychoanalysis: the novelist H.G. Wells, the painter Salvador Dalí, the poet and essayist Stefan Zweig. The American writer and philanthropist Princess Marie Bonaparte, who had been instrumental in securing Freud's release from Vienna, was a regular visitor. Arthur Koestler, whose intellectual world overlapped with the psychoanalytic circle, was part of the broader NW3 community that Freud inhabited in his final months.
Freud died at Maresfield Gardens on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of war. His body was cremated at Golders Green, and his ashes rest in an Etruscan urn from his antiquities collection. The house at 20 Maresfield Gardens became the Freud Museum after Anna Freud's death in 1982, and it is now one of London's most visited cultural attractions: a house museum that preserves both the physical environment of Freud's last year and the broader legacy of the psychoanalytic tradition that the house represents.
The Psychoanalytic Circle of NW3
Freud's arrival in NW3 reinforced and expanded a psychoanalytic community that had already been establishing itself in the neighbourhood. The British Psychoanalytical Society, while headquartered in various West End locations, drew much of its membership from analysts living in the Hampstead and Belsize Park area, and the concentration of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists in NW3 was sufficiently large by the late 1930s to constitute a genuine professional community of the first importance.
The personalities who made up this community were as varied as they were distinguished. Melanie Klein, the Austrian psychoanalyst whose theoretical innovations — the concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the theory of internal objects — would prove enormously influential on the subsequent development of British psychoanalysis, was based in London from 1926. Her relationship with Anna Freud would generate one of the most intellectually productive and personally acrimonious theoretical controversies in the history of psychoanalysis — the "Controversial Discussions" of the early 1940s, conducted within the British Psychoanalytical Society, in which the followers of Klein and of Anna Freud debated fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and the technique of psychoanalytic treatment.
The Freud Museum Legacy
The transformation of 20 Maresfield Gardens into the Freud Museum has created one of the most remarkable cultural sites in London. The preservation of Freud's study exactly as it was when he worked there — with his couch, his desk, his chairs, and his extraordinary collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquities arranged as he arranged them — provides an experience of unusual intimacy with a historical figure of the first importance. The antiquities, which Freud acquired throughout his professional life and which served as both aesthetic pleasure and intellectual resource, are of considerable artistic and archaeological value in their own right, quite apart from their connection to their original owner.
The museum has also served as an important institutional focus for the continuing development of psychoanalytic culture in London. Through its programmes of lectures, exhibitions, and publications, it has maintained the connection between the physical legacy of Freud's NW3 years and the living intellectual tradition of psychoanalysis and its applications. The annual Freud lecture, delivered by distinguished figures from various fields, has become one of the notable events in London's intellectual calendar and a reminder that the ideas developed in the consulting room at Maresfield Gardens continue to be relevant to the understanding of human psychology and culture.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*