Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts Exhibition Room: Freud Museum London Audio Guide [English]
Mar 25, 2026
Vanessa Bonny, curator at Freud Museum London, guides visitors through The Symptomatic Surreal and Leonora Carrington’s sanatorium-inspired works. Short chapters explore Carrington’s 1938 writings, human-animal hybridity, wartime trauma, visionary drawing as communication, and the sanatorium as a mythic underworld leading to artistic metamorphosis.
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Freuds Bedroom Became The Exhibition Room
- The exhibition room was originally Sigmund and Martha Freud's bedroom but Freud rarely slept there in his final year.
- Vanessa Bonny explains Freud often stayed in his study due to illness while Martha continued to sleep in this room.
Sanatorium Experience Shaped Carringtons Surrealism
- The Symptomatic Surreal exhibition links Leonora Carrington's sanatorium experience to her Surrealist practice.
- Vanessa Bonny situates Carrington's 1938 writing and imagery of human-animal hybrids as formative to her transgressive artistic identity.
Max Ernsts Internment Triggered Carringtons Crisis
- Max Ernst's arrest and internment as war began precipitated Leonora Carrington's mental decline and hospitalization.
- Vanessa Bonny recounts how geopolitical turmoil and Ernst's internment combined to overwhelm Carrington emotionally.