Berggasse 19, the address at which Sigmund Freud and his family lived for almost fifty years, is now Vienna’s Freud Museum. It is the other Freud Museum, the one in London, that houses the extensive collection of antiquities which is Janine Burke’s main focus in The Gods of Freud, but the Berggasse museum contains a number of Freud’s other personal possessions, including some little bottles, pots and brushes that are the remnants of an old-fashioned gentleman’s dressing-case. Of high quality, these well-used tools of personal attention to a body now long dead are scratched and dented from use. Still sitting there quietly almost seventy years after his death, Freud’s things seem numinous and luminous, paradoxically radiating the very essence of self that his own ideas did so much to deconstruct. I was reminded of them vividly by this description from Burke’s book: ‘Freud was concerned with style and appearance, down to the tiniest and most exquisite detail. A quietly vain man, he visited his barber every morning to have his beard trimmed (foppish even by Viennese standards) and aspired to wear the best suits money could buy.’