This past Sunday 5 May, The Guardian featured an article entitled “Interpretation of seams? Sigmund Freud’s couch needs £5,000 restoration”. It recounts how the Freud Museum in London has launched an appeal for funds to restore ‘possibly the most famous piece of furniture in the world’:

It is possibly the most famous piece of furniture in the world, but the couch in Sigmund Freud‘s consulting room is now sagging under the weight of more than a century of dreams, terrors, traumas and phobias, and is overdue for a facelift.

The Freud Museum in London has launched an appeal on what would have been his 157th birthday for funds to restore the couch on which his patients lay while they bared their souls to him.

Many of Freud’s most famous patients, whose psychological traumas helped him to formulate his theories of psychoanalysis, lay on the couch. They included the “Wolf Man”, a wealthy Russian whose sister and father both killed themselves, nicknamed for a childhood dream he recalled while lying on the couch; “Dora”, whom Freud diagnosed as suffering from hysteria; and the “Rat Man”, named for his obsessive fantasies.

To read the entire article, click here.