A new exhibition celebrates the women who featured in Freud's life, and the female artists inspired by his ideas.
Women & Freud will be the first show of its kind to explore the father of psychoanalysis' relationships with the patients, family, friends colleagues and writers who shaped his life.
It will also look at the artists who whose work is influenced by Freud’s theories including Paula Rego, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Kneebone, Cornelia Parker and Sarah Lucas.
Women featured in the exhibition include Freud's daughter Anna, a pioneering child psychoanalyst, and Virginia Woolf, who came to tea at his Freud's Hampstead home with husband Leonard and started publishing his work in English.
Also included is Princess Marie Bonaparte, a patient who became an analyst, and helped fund Freud's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna, and his early patients Anna O, Cäcilie M, and Dora, whom he called his ‘teachers’ and who led him to develop psychoanalysis.
Running from October 30 at Freud Museum London the exhibition is supported by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust.
Like Freud, the Viennese painter left Austria just after the German Anschluss in 1938 and went to England.
Freud spent the last year of his life in the house in Maresfield Gardens, while Marie-Louise and her mother Henriette settled in Hampstead in 1948.
The exhibition unfolds through film, historic items, books, letters, diaries, photographs, sketchbooks, manuscripts and artworks hung throughout the rooms and garden of Freud's former family home.
It includes items loaned by the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the British Psychoanalytical Society, and international art collections.
Among the art highlights are a series of previously unseen works in fabric by Paula Rego, including ‘dollies’ and ‘Alice’s Oversized Chair’; Tracey Emin’s neon work, ‘I Whisper to My Past Do I Have Another Choice’; Alison Bechdel’s ‘Are You My Mother?’; porcelain by Rachel Kneebone; drawings by Cornelia Parker; and sculpture by Sarah Lucas.
Also featured are early women analysts and writers Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, whose words will be voiced by Highgate actor Juliet Stevenson), and Melanie Klein who visited Freud in Maresfield Gardens.
Work by artists who have explored Freud’s legacy, including his ideas of memory, free association and sexuality and also include Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Alice Anderson, Christina Kimeze, Helen Chadwick, Carolina Mazzolari, Sharon Kivland, Abigail Schama and Emily Berry.
A short film by Deborah Levy and Sarah Thorburn, featuring an antique music box and a ballerina, will lead visitors upstairs to where historic exhibits include 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.
The Museum will invite high-profile authors to join analysts and thinkers for a series of special in-conversation events to accompany the exhibition, which is curated by Bryony Davies, and Lisa Appignanesi OBE, whose books, include (with John Forrester) Freud’s Women, and Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors.
Lisa Appignanesi and Bryony Davies said: "The exhibition reveals how women were the driving force behind psychoanalysis and how Freud’s life and work continue to intrigue women today.
"The combination of a truly exceptional collection of works of art and the unparalleled personal setting will make the exhibition a memorable and significant instalment in the continuing story and enduring legacy of Sigmund Freud.”
Giuseppe Albano, Director of the Freud Museum London, said: “This exhibition will be the first to showcase our newly refurbished events and exhibition rooms.
"We are immensely grateful to the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust for their generous contribution, which has made the improvements possible, as well as their support of the Women & Freud exhibition and future exhibition programming. We are overjoyed at the prospect of presenting such a magnificent array of artists in Freud’s home and garden."
Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists runs 30th October to 5th May 2025 www.freud.org
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