Being a very passionate Psychology student I am, the weather didn’t stop me and my friends to visit the Freud Museum on Sunday.

The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, was the home of Sigmund Freud and his family. Freud is most famously known as the Father of Psychoanalysis, he is one of the most influential and controversial psychologist in the 20th century.

Freud developed the theory that people have an unconscious mind, in which sexual and aggressive impulses are suppressed ( or as he said, were censored). He started to analyse dreams and as unconscious desires and wish-filfullments. He would have his patients lying on a couch in his study and ask them to talk about their dreams and childhood experience. The sessions sometimes last for more than 8 hours. If you are interested to learn more about his life and theories, you might find these websites quite useful: Freud’s history  and his theories.

Freud’s psychoanalytic couch.

He was also a collector of books, antiquities and head sculptures. He had over 1600 books in his study and his remarkable collection of antiquities: Egyptian; Greek; Roman and Oriental. He read not only books about psychology but also medicine, philosophy, archaeology and architecture. Freud had gained insights into the unconscious mind and developed his theories by reading a wide range of literature. He would compare the mind to architecture and he suggested that the mind is like a building; you have to go to the deepest level in order to find the greatest treasure within.

And here is my favourite quote from Freud: “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

I hope you find this post interesting and hopefully it might inspire you to pursue a degree in Psychology.

Any questions, feel free to leave a comment or email us on: hongkong@surrey.ac.uk