Went over to Freud's house in Finchley at the weekend. He only lived there for about a year of his life (he died shortly after leaving Nazi occupied Austria, in 1939) But importantly it houses his library, furniture and collections. His passion for collecting ancient artefacts, was second only to his addiction to cigars apparently- many small figurines were housed cabinets, shelves and noteably filling approximatley half of his desk- i'm going to refrain from talking about fetishism here or suggest that a historical item from some egyptian burial chamber is an absent phallus. Freud used his collection as a metaphor for psychoanalysis using it to show how conscious material wears away whilst the unconcious is relativley unchanging- i.e. in being buried, the artefacts in the room were preserved. There are very few things connecting Freud's collection together; the fact that the great man owned them is probably validation enough as to their criteria for being a collection, however they were all very old some up to 4500 years old, of either ancient near eastern, greco, egyptian, roman or chinese. The most interesting thing about this carefully accumulated, kept and displayed 'museum' is how subjective it is. Anyway, I think he's an interesting guy with an interesting collection- i hope i can say more later about it but this might be it.