Exhibition shines light on Freud's China interest

The name of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is known worldwide, and more than 80 years after his death in 1939, he remains a cornerstone in the study of mental health.

Born in 1856, Freud built his reputation in Austria before fleeing in 1938, following its annexation by the Nazis. He settled in London and his home in Hampstead is now a museum.

Although Freud's life has been closely studied, one largely overlooked aspect is his interest in China, a situation that a new exhibition at the museum, called Freud and China, hopes to correct.

It focuses on around 100 Chinese pieces in his collection of more than 2,000 antiquities. Although they are outnumbered by pieces from cultures, such as Rome or ancient Greece, Freud's flight from Vienna showed their importance, because when he was forced to flee, initially, he smuggled out just two pieces-and one of them was Chinese.

"Later on, he managed to get the whole collection to London, but in his moment of desperation, when he thought he would lose everything, one of the items he took was a jade screen that sat on his desk in Vienna," Craig Clunas, the exhibition's curator and a professor emeritus of history of art at Oxford University, told China Daily.