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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Comments (3)
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  • nooyawka212 says:

    I am writ­ing this com­ment at the end of Novem­ber 2013; these videos have been on this web­site and avail­able since May 2012. I am amazed that there have been no com­ments already on this site. Could the lack of com­ments be a sign that Freud’s over­ar­ch­ing stature in the 20th cen­tu­ry has been dis­solved? At cer­tain points in the 20th cen­tu­ry a per­son could not have a dis­cus­sion about almost any top­ic with­out an allu­sion to Freud and an attempt to inter­pret the phe­nom­e­non in a Freudi­an fash­ion. Noth­ing of the sort here. No one spec­u­lat­ing about these videos and their mean­ings. Of the two Euro­pean the­o­rists of the late 19th cen­tu­ry, Freud and Marx, it seems only Marx sur­vives, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

  • morton kaplan says:

    That psy­cho­analy­sis is now more hon­ored in the breach should come as no sur­prise. Resis­tance to the uncov­er­ing of one’s own uncon­scious accounts for much rejec­tion of its the­o­ries. The dif­fi­cul­ty, cost, and length of treat­ment have had its effect as well. Most unpop­u­lar: the child is father of the man.

  • vern says:

    2 old farts ralk­ing, quack, quack. Freud and his the­o­ries these days are “of his­tor­i­cal inter­est” and noth­ing more.

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