Reparative Objects in the Freudian Archives

This chapter returns to the Freudian narrative of loss, specifically to sites of his memorialization in the two Freud Museums. Forced into exile after living in Vienna for seventy-eight years, Freud escaped to London where most of his material objects followed him. The chapter examines the reconstruction of Freud’s Viennese study and consulting room at what is now the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London, where Freud died in the presence of his massive collection of antiquities. Whereas the Freud Museum, London, now houses all the “good” Freudian artifacts, objects that could be said to function reparatively, the museum that occupies Freud’s former residence in Vienna compensates for his expulsion and the evacuation of his prized possessions through a fetishizing and melancholic reliance upon photographs taken by Edmund Engelman prior to the objects’ displacement. The chapter interprets the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, as a space of irremediable loss where Freud’s missing objects—his couch, books, and antiquities—take on the character of fantasied partial objects enlisted to perform the work of mourning.