The narcissistic cat

This magnificent cat was sitting outside a bijou Hampstead restaurant as I passed this morning on my way to the Freud museum in Maresfield Gardens. This is actually in the house where Freud lived after he escaped from Vienna in 1939 as the Nazis were driving out the Jews and destroying their property. He arrived with his family and his entourage and all his belongings and set up home in Hampstead for a short couple of years before he died.

I've been there before but I particularly wanted to catch the current exhibition called Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors, which addresses 200 years of women's mental health via first hand accounts, case histories, photographs, films and documents. It focuses in particular on the female members of Freud's household, his patients, pupils and followers, and the women who benefited, or might have done, from psychoanalysis including Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath. The exhibition also hosts some works by contemporary artists on the same theme.

Whether or not you give any credence to Freud's theories the place is a fascinating slice of an outdated lifestyle, and a peep into a complex and brilliant mind facilitated by a selfless wife, a faithful housekeeper and a dutiful daughter. Photographs include the family dogs, the chows to which Freud was devoted. (When his favourite died he wrote "One cannot easily get over seven years of intimacy.")
But I've never heard of any association, free or otherwise, between Freud and cats.

SO, I was pleasantly surprised to read in a open book on display (the memoirs of one of Freud's disciples, Lou Andreas-Salomé), the following account:
One day a cat entered Freud's ground floor study through the open window, walked across his desk and made itself comfortable on the sofa. Then it got down and inspected a collection of antique objects placed on the floor. These antiquities, Greek, Roman and Egyptian (including cats) were Freud's pride and joy, and he was alarmed lest the cat, if chased away, do any harm to them. "But when the cat proceeded to make known its archaeological satisfaction by purring, and with its lithe grace did not cause the slightest damage Freud's heart melted and he ordered milk for it." This visit became a regular daily occurrence. However, "despite Freud's increasing affection and admiration, the cat paid him not a bit of attention and coldly turned its green eyes with their slanting pupils towards him as to any other object. When for instance he wanted more of the cat than its egoistic-narcissistic purring, he had to put his foot down from his comfortable chaise and court its attention with the ingenious enticement of his shoe-toe." Eventually the unequal relationship was brought to an end by the sudden death of the cat, much lamented and "leaving naught of itself behind but a symbolic picture of all the peaceful and playful charm of true egoism."

I suspect this cat, sitting among the table decorations and no doubt awaiting a luncheon fresh from the restaurant kitchen, is equally narcissistic. It certainly showed no inclination to engage with me and its green eyes would not meet mine.

(I did a previous blip on the subject of Freud and Free Association, in this same area.)