Sigmund Freud Museum

The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna is located at Berggasse 19, where Freud lived and worked for 47 years. Founded in 1971, the museum showcases his private rooms, practice, and exhibitions on the development of psychoanalysis, the Freud family’s life, and the building’s history. It also features a conceptual art collection and special exhibitions.

Planning your visit

Berggasse 19 is where Freud lived and practised for 47 years, until the Anschluss forced him into exile in London in 1938 at the age of 82. The museum occupies the apartment and consulting rooms, and its most striking curatorial decision is what is not there: the furniture, the carpets and the famous couch went to London with him, and the rooms have been deliberately left empty rather than reconstructed. Bare floorboards, blank walls, and the absence itself presented as the subject.

That emptiness carries the history of expulsion more effectively than a reconstruction would. Freud's daughter Anna's rooms are included, and the museum holds his waiting room furniture, his collection of antiquities in part, photographs, letters, first editions and film. A conceptual art collection responds to the space.

The 2020 renovation expanded the museum into the whole building and added extensive material on psychoanalysis's development and the fate of Vienna's Jewish intellectual world.

Anyone expecting the couch should know it is at the Freud Museum in London.

Bookable options include entry tickets and guided tours, which help considerably given how much of the meaning is in the emptiness rather than in objects. Current availability is shown below.