Residence 1
📍Sigmunda Freuda 117/15, 742 58 Příbor, Czech Republic
1856 – 1860“I was born in this house in Freiberg in Mähren on the sixth of May 1856 — what is now Příbor in the Czech Republic, though no such nation existed then. We were Jewish and therefore of perpetually uncertain status in whatever empire we inhabited. My father Jakob was a wool merchant; the business failed and we moved first to Leipzig and then to Vienna when I was four. I have almost no memories of Freiberg itself — only an impression of warmth and resinous air, which I have since identified with pine forests in the Carpathian foothills. My work later concerned itself precisely with how the earliest experiences shape all that follows — how the first rooms of childhood become the architecture of the adult mind. That I cannot remember my own first rooms has struck me, over fifty years of clinical practice, as the most complete example of my own theory that I have ever encountered. The unconscious protects us from what we cannot yet use.”
👍 LovedThe impression of warmth that is my only genuine early memory — unspecific but persistent across eighty years of life
👎 DislikedThe anti-Semitic restrictions that made my father's business impossible and forced the move that gave me Vienna and, eventually, exile from it
🗺️ Approximate location today
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Residence 2
📍Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna, Austria
1891 – 1938“I lived and practised at Berggasse 19 for forty-seven years. Every Wednesday evening my colleagues gathered in my waiting room — from which the entire psychoanalytic movement grew. On the consulting couch lay patients from across Europe and America; I sat behind them, unseen, listening for what language conceals. When the Nazis came in 1938, my books were burned. My daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo. Then we left. A man of eighty-two does not emigrate willingly. Austria expelled me.”
👍 LovedThe antiquities collection on my desk — Egyptian gods and Greek heroes lining my consulting room like an attentive audience
👎 DislikedThe wilful misreading of my work, and the political climate that turned Vienna's intellectual life into something dangerous
🗺️ Approximate location today
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Residence 3
📍20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, United Kingdom
1938 – 1939“After the Anschluss in March 1938, the Gestapo interrogated my daughter Anna for a full day. That was when I understood that we had to leave Vienna — the city where I had practised for forty-seven years, built a movement, and made the most uncomfortable discoveries about the human mind. Ernest Jones arranged the visas; the British government expedited them. We arrived in London in June 1938 and settled at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead by September, where my family recreated my Vienna consulting room as precisely as possible — the antiquities on their shelves, the couch in the corner, the same position of everything. I had oral cancer and was in considerable pain. I worked when I could. I died on the twenty-third of September 1939, three weeks after the war began. London gave me the dignity of a natural death when Vienna had begun preparing something else entirely. For that I was grateful.”
👍 LovedThe recreation of my consulting room — the familiar objects that made exile feel, briefly, like continuation
👎 DislikedLeaving Vienna at eighty-two, knowing I would not return and that the city I had made my intellectual home had expelled me
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
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