Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

A tour of the landing at Sigmund Freud's final home, highlighting striking portraits and personal objects. Contrasts between a formal 70th‑birthday painting and Salvador Dali's surreal depiction. Stories about Dali's 1938 visit and Freud's reaction to surrealism. Introductions to the Wolfman paintings and Freud's antiquities, including a sphinx-linked vase.

A guided walk through Sigmund Freud’s study, spotlighting his desk piled with papers and antiquities. Learn about his custom chair and trademark reading posture. Hear the story of the famous couch’s gift and how sessions were conducted with Freud out of sight. Discover how the Vienna furnishings were reassembled in London and the study’s final years.

A guided walk through the hallway of Sigmund Freud’s final London home. Stories about his 1938 escape from Austria and the relief of arriving in England. Contrasts between the London house’s elegance and the family’s modest Vienna flat. Personal details like Freud’s coat, glasses and how illness shaped his daily routine.

A guided tour of Sigmund Freud's dining room and family life in his London home. Stories of his long courtship and marriage to Martha, and the fates of their children and relatives. Accounts of household members who fled with them and the route they took to safety. Notes on Austrian peasant furniture and Anna Freud's country-cottage taste. Context on psychoanalysis spreading worldwide.

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.

In this episode, Tom is in conversation with artist Cathie Pilkington about her current exhibition Housekeeper at the Freud Museum.

Perry Hughes and Tom DeRose discuss Freud's paper 'Psychopathic Characters on the Stage'.  

A lively walkthrough of Freud's 1915 paper on repression. They map historical context and Freud's metapsychological aims. The discussion contrasts primal fixation with secondary repression and traces how repression spawns fantasy, symptoms, and anxiety. Clinical mechanisms like conversion, somatization, and obsessional processes are highlighted. The conversation ends by noting limits and open questions in Freud's sketch.

In this episode, Tom welcomes back Jamie Ruers to the programme, and they discuss the current Freud Museum exhibition Freud and Latin America, which she curated.

In the episode, Tom is joined by Professor Roman Gerodimos, Professor Candida Yates, and Mark Leipacher of The Faction, who reflect on an event held at the Freud Museum which explored the theme of Shame in Shakespeare's Macbeth.