During one of my academic courses, I was introduced to Sigmund Freud and his theories. For the remainder of the semester, terms such as the id, ego and superego quietly entered our everyday conversations. At the time, I did not imagine that nearly a decade later, I would stand inside the very apartment where Freud lived and worked for nearly 47 years.

Located at Wien IX, Berggasse 19 in Vienna, Austria, the apartment is widely regarded as the birthplace of psychoanalysis. It was here that Freud received patients, developed his therapeutic methods, and wrote many of his most influential works. In 1938, Freud and his family left their house in Austria to escape the Nazi persecution, a year before his demise in 1939.

Today, the apartment functions as a museum. Situated on the first floor, above a coffee and souvenir shop, the entrance to the museum is understated, almost easy to miss. Visitors stand before a heavy brown door, and much like his patients did nearly a century ago, ring the bell to enter the house of Sigmund Freud.

Freud rented this apartment as a young doctor and a family man. The apartment consists of several rooms, each now curated with family photographs, handwritten notes, letters and artefacts from Freud’s life, including his well-known spectacles. These rooms once served members of the Freud family and today serve as quiet witnesses to intellectual history. It is difficult to reconcile their ordinariness with the magnitude of ideas that were conceived within them.

To me, the most striking space was Freud’s study room, treatment room and waiting room, where he and his youngest daughter, Anna Freud, also a pioneering psychoanalyst, received patients over the years. The waiting room is among the few areas arranged to resemble its early 1900s appearance and it once served as a meeting place for Freud’s Wednesday Psychological Society meet ups with his colleagues.

Although many of the original furnishings were taken to London when the family fled, later in the 1970s, Anna Freud visited the apartment and donated select pieces to help restore parts of the house for the museum. The famous psychoanalytic couch, placed in front of a tapestry in the treatment room, where patients once lay and spoke freely, however, remains in London. Its absence itself is palpable. The space, which hosted the couch and the fauteuil, has been retained with holes in the wall as a reminder of the impact and displacement due to the Second World War. In fact, after Freud and his family left, the apartment housed around 80 Jews before they were deported to concentration camps.

Frued’s study retains a distinct presence — photographs of Freud’s desk and shelves lined with hundreds of books and personal objects. An important original item in the room is the mirror that Anna Freud brought back in 1971, when the museum was opened, and placed it on the handle of the window where it used to hang. In the mirror, Freud could see himself and sometimes the guests seated at a small table by his side. Standing in his room, I found myself drawn to the window. It was the same window Freud must have looked through countless times — between patients, between thoughts, between discoveries. I wondered how different the house must have felt then, and what he might have seen and experienced. Did he sense that his ideas would outlive him, and will make people from across the world visit his house.

The study along with other parts of the house offers glimpses into some of Freud’s most influential work, his correspondence with colleagues, his personal struggles and victories, details of his ill health and his anxieties about the World War. It also reveals that nearly 50 of the 200 dreams that Freud analysed in The Interpretation of Dreams were his own, that emerged within these personal and domestic spaces.

Towards the end of my visit, I stopped at the souvenir shop, which offered a wide array of items dedicated to Freud. I picked up a few keepsakes bearing two quotes attributed to Freud — “Man must have compassion for others, yet consideration for himself” and “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing.”

As I stepped back onto the streets of Vienna, the theories that had casually entered classroom conversations years ago now felt real. What stayed with me was not just the simplicity of the apartment, but the significance of what had taken shape within it. There was nothing grand or theatrical about the space. It was simply a home — a place where a man lived, worked and thought deeply about his subject.

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