Women who shaped Freud: New exhibition unveils their influences in Freud’s life and work

A new exhibition opening next month at Sigmund Freud’s former home is taking a look at the women who featured in Freud’s work and life.

(c) Freud Museum

From the ‘hysterics’ – early patients whom Freud called his ‘teachers’ – to later patients, family, friends, colleagues, writers and artists, the exhibition, the first to look at their influence will reveal the women who shaped Freud’s life and hail those whose work carries the influence of Freud’s thoughts and theories.

The exhibition won’t be limited to the main exhibition space, but will fill the whole house.

The exhibition will combine historic items, books, letters, diaries, photographs, sketchbooks, and manuscripts with significant artworks from across the world. It will weave its way through the Freud family home and the rooms where Sigmund and his daughter, the pioneering child psychoanalyst Anna Freud, analysed patients.

Among the historic exhibits are early love letters between Freud and his wife Martha during their engagement; extracts from analyst Lou Andreas-Salomé’s diaries; Marie Bonaparte’s childhood notebooks, outlining her dreams; and a selection of female figures from Freud’s antiquities collection, dating from Middle Bronze Age Syria (2000 BCE) to 1st century CE France.

From the bottom of Freud’s garden to the top of his house, artists will grapple with Freud’s legacy, including his ideas of memory, free association and sexuality.

The exhibition, Women & Freud runs from 30th October 2024 to 5th May 2025 at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, where Freud spent the last year of his life and to which he welcomed some of the women who feature in the exhibition.