The Daily Novel

Sigmund Freud would have had a few surprises if he had come along with me last night to the book launch in the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. The museum is housed in the house in which he lived for the last year of his life.. He had to flee his native Vienna 1938 when the Nazis began to round up the Jews. After his death it was lived in for many years by his daughter, Anna, the child psychotherapist.

He would have delighted to find all the books, letters and papers which was all he and Anna managed to bring with them when they fled in the middle of the night from Vienna, after a visit from the Gestapo. He would have been very pleased that the house is full of the kind of archaeological artefacts that he had collected from all parts of the world in his house in Vienna. He would have enjoyed the bubble of conversation and the gales of laughter from the hundred or so psychoanalysts at the party, letting their hair down after a hard day’s labour by the couch, keeping their mouths shut so as not to interrupt too soon the stories which their patients were telling them.

But when he came to the shop he would have puked. The face of the man who based his theory and practice on the analyst remaining invisible and silent so that the patient could project on to him the feelings they have for their own parents and other important figures in their lives, is emblazoned on all manner of contemporary artefacts. You can buy T-Shirts, finger puppets, mugs, and jigsaw puzzles with his picture. You can get key rings labelled ego, id or super-ego, to suit your mood. My favourite was the fluffy slippers with a bobble containing Freud’s distinctive face and spectacles on them (£18.50 if you are interested). The only thing I did not see was a Freudian silk slip with the great man’s image imprinted on it. But perhaps they had sold out.

Freud would had got a few shocks too if he had read the book by Patrick Casement, Learning from Life. Particularly when he got to the penultimate chapter, which reveals that after retiring from taking new patients Casement has come round to the belief that God might well exist. He now spends his Sunday evenings singing his praises in our local Church. Poor Sigmund. All those attempts to denounce his former friend, Carl Gustav Jung, have been in vain. One of his most popular followers has finally come to a position which is closer to Jung than to Freud.

More on this most interesting journey through life in my next blog.