The characteristic couch of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, welcomes visitors at the Freud Museum in London who decide to explore what was the psychoanalyst’s home in the last year of his life, especially after the premiere of the film Freud’s last session.
This sofa, the center of the study of the house located in the London neighborhood of Hampstead, was used by the psychoanalyst to recreate his home in Vienna when he was forced to flee to the United Kingdom after his daughter Anna Freud was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo on the eve of the start of World War II (1939-45).
Now, once again, the room is reinterpreted and brought to life in the newly released film Freud’s last sessionwhere Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins on the big screen) has a conversation with the author of Chronicles of NarniaCS Lewis (Matthew Goode), about the existence of God and some of humanity’s big questions.
However, for producer Meg Thomson, the film goes beyond these issues. “The more I get into it, the more I think it’s a conversation about the most important questions and where you can discover the humanity in the person you’re talking to, even if they have a worldview that’s diametrically opposed to yours.” , he indicated.
Although the film is inspired by the lives of the characters it talks about, there is no historical record that many of the situations presented in the film actually occurred.
Although the film is inspired by the lives of the characters it talks about, there is no historical record that many of the situations presented in the film actually occurred.
In fact, according to Thomson, the research progressively stopped after the arrival of the director, Matt Brown, who sought to transform the project, based on a play inspired by a novel, into something more cinematic.
“When Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode came on board, they were much more interested in investigating the Freud and Lewis created by the screenwriters than the Freud and Lewis that existed,” the producer added.
However, the greatest example of a fictitious event is the conversation between Freud and Lewis, of which there is no evidence, as the director of the Freud House Museum, Giuseppe Albano, informed EFE at the end of the film’s broadcast in one of the rooms of what was the psychoanalyst’s home.
“Even so, based on their texts, on their beliefs and on what these great minds said, I believe that it is a very possible relationship that is shown in the film, even if it never happened,” said Albano.
Freud’s House Museum
The director of the museum calls on people to visit it and learn more about the history of the psychoanalyst, as well as that of his daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychoanalysis.
Taking advantage of the situation of the film and the centenary of the publication of the essay The I and the Id of Freud, the director of the museum calls on people to visit it and learn more about the history of the psychoanalyst, as well as that of his daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychoanalysis.
In addition to the famous study of the founder of the psychoanalytic movement, which contains objects from his collection of around 2,500 antiquities, most of them from Egypt, the visit allows you to tour the rooms of Anna Freud and her father, as well as the garden or the small gallery that they built before arriving at the home in 1938.
Many of these objects, including Sigmund Freud’s sofa or ergonomic chair, were scanned to be later recreated in the film, shot in studios in Dublin.
The premiere of the feature film means that these elements coexist with some of the sketches that the film production made in order to transfer the Freud House Museum in London to the cinema, and which are now in one of the hallways of the house.
AUTHOR: EFE (London)
