Sigmund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Private Life

Not long ago we post­ed the only known record­ing of Sig­mund Freud’s voice. Today we present rare home movies of the founder of mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy, cap­tured dur­ing the last decade of his life.

The scenes are nar­rat­ed by Freud’s youngest daugh­ter Anna, who allowed the footage to be shown only with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic com­mu­ni­ty before her death in 1982. The first scenes in the clip above were filmed in 1932 at Freud’s sum­mer home in Pöt­zleins­dorf, a sub­urb of Vien­na. He is shown vis­it­ing with his old friend Emanuel Löwy, an archae­ol­o­gist, and pet­ting his dog Jofi. The next sequence was shot between 1934 and 1937 at Freud’s lat­er sum­mer home in Grinz­ing, now a dis­trict of Vien­na. It shows Freud relax­ing with a book while his wife Martha and her sis­ter, Min­na Bernays, do their sewing. The movies were made by Freud’s friend and patient Mark Brunswick, hus­band of the psy­cho­an­a­lyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, a close asso­ciate of Freud’s.

You can watch the com­plete 24-minute film from which these scenes were tak­en on YouTube. And you can view or down­load a series of anno­tat­ed clips at the Freud Muse­um Web site.

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