Queering the Freud Museum: Critical Reflections on a Museum Tour about Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s Life Together at 20 Maresfield Gardens

The house in Hampstead that is, today, the Freud Museum London is best known as the last home of Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha. For nearly four decades, Anna Freud shared this home with Dorothy Burlingham, a fellow child psychoanalyst. A special guided tour of the museum in 2025, the centenary of Freud and Burlingham's first meeting, focused on their personal and professional relationship. Part I of this article reproduces this tour through vignettes, photographs and an edited version of the tour notes. In Part II, we critically consider the tour as an experiment in queering the Freud Museum London. We suggest that contemporary readings of Freudian theory, which emphasize the unpredictability of desire and the instability of identity, can enrich the recent ‘queering the museum’ movement ( Sullivan & Middleton, 2021 ). We consider the repressed queerness of the family tree of psychoanalysis and propose the tour as an encounter with a ‘ruined museum’ ( Landau & Pohl, 2021 ) with many absences and presences. Finally, we consider what these queer interactions with museums and museum objects might mobilize, as complex psychic experiences involving societal and cultural norms about gender and sexuality. We ask, what happens if we encounter the Freud Museum as the queer family home of psychoanalysis?