ABSTRACT
While Jonathan Hill’s and Ro Spankie’s chapters offer an exploration of John Soane and Sigmund Freud’s spaces, respectively; this chapter brings these two characters together discussing the intersection between space and collecting. It focuses on the psychoanalyst and the architect – drawing not an analogy between psychoanalysis and architecture, but a comparison between the texts they wrote and the spaces they filled with their collections. Freud and Soane lived almost one century apart, so they never met or influenced each other. It is possible that Freud knew about Soane and his work. But there is no evidence he was familiar with the Neoclassical architect with whom he shared a common passion. Freud and Soane were both scholars and collectors. Both lived at the great age of archaeological excavation. Both collected antiquities, relics, fragments and books, which they displayed in the spaces in which they lived and practised. Surrounded by their antique objects, Freud and Soane aspired to recover ancient worlds that had become legendary with time. The former used the analogy of excavation to access the off-limits of the mind. The latter speculated that an antiquarian of the future would investigate his house-museum cast as ruin and, like an archaeologist, attempt to reconstruct its former purpose. Freud made use of archaeological terms and suggested parallels between archaeology and psychoanalysis. Soane did not see fragments as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle providing clues to a reconstruction, but as Picturesque ruins, taking delight in the romantic effects of the damage done with time. Yet, like Freud, he was obsessed with antiquity, archaeology, beauty and the arts and used his collection to create ensembles of world civilisations.
Soane and Freud lived when great museums were established across Europe but used explorations of history that were unusual and inventive. In this chapter I discuss how the two scholars arranged the spaces in which they lived and worked; how the arrangement of these spaces relates to the arrangement of their collections; how they used the analogy of archaeology to express the self and the workings of the mind, synthesising rational thought with the irrational realm of the imagination. The larger intention is to contribute to the discussion of the ways in which space and collections can become sites of invention.
