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© Edmund Engelman

Fascinated by archaeology, Sigmund Freud collected Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Roman and Chinese artifacts, which he kept piled on shelves and tabletops. In May 1938, before the Freud family fled to London to escape Hitler, Edmund Engelman photographed Freud’s study (shown here) and consulting room (see photo of consulting room) in Vienna, which contained nearly 2,000 ancient objects. (The color photo in the sidebar to this article shows a reconstruction of Freud’s study in his London house, now the Freud Museum.) Even his orderly desk was crowded with figurines that he absent-mindedly caressed as he worked. Freud described his collecting as “an addiction second in intensity only to [his] nicotine addiction.”