Sigmund Freud Archives
collection of documents related to the Austrian psychotherapist
The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London. The archives comprise Freud's tapes, letters and papers. It was founded in 1951 by Kurt R. Eissler among others, and received contributions from Anna Freud.
It was at the center of a complicated scandal, described by Janet Malcolm in her book In the Freud Archives and by Jeffrey Masson in his book Final Analysis.
History
Early history
The Archives were founded by Kurt R. Eissler in 1951, together with a group of people who knew Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Hermann Nunberg. It was directed by Eissler for decades after its founding. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud documents, claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded confidentiality and even when no potential victims of the revelation of those documents existed. By the 1980s, Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had expanded the collection to include thousands of items.
Masson controversy
Eissler was introduced to Masson in 1974. Masson was appointed secretary, and Eissler intended for Masson to succeed him as director, which he did in 1980.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sigmund Freud Archives” is collection of documents related to the Austrian psychotherapist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sigmund, Freud and Archives, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7512477. VIAF identifies the subject as 128014665. The Library of Congress control number is n97055719. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1974 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sigmund Freud Archives” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.