Anubis - Replica of Sigmund Freud's Ceramic Figurine by Martha Todd

Among the Egyptian figures, the Freud Museum London holds seven objects from Freud’s collection archive related to Anubis, the dog-headed god of the underworld. As the divine guide of souls to the afterlife, Anubis may have held a particular resonance for Freud. Just as Anubis guided the dead through the hidden realm beyond life, Freud sought to guide his patients through the hidden layers of the psyche, excavating buried memories, uncovering repressed experiences and confronting the return of what had been push into the unconscious. In this way, Anubis stands as a powerful symbol of Freud’s intellectual journey into an exploration of death, memory and the enduring presence of the unseen within the human mind. 

Sigmund Freud’s serious collecting began with Egyptian antiquities around the time of his father’s death. It is possible that, through his Egyptian antiquities, Freud found a symbolic means of grappling with personal loss, a way of exerting intellectual and imaginative control over a devastating turning point in his life. Freud’s deepening interest in Egyptology coincided with his exploration of the concept he famously termed The Uncanny. The uncanny occupies a space between the known and the hidden, the familiar and the repressed. It evokes dead as it reveals what has been buried within us. In his 1919 essay, Freud described it as, “That class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”