Anyone who has ever had to deal with the belongings of the newly dead will know with what clarity and power a person’s things can speak for them. Personal possessions, lovingly chosen and cherished, form an intersection between the material fact of the body and the abstract idea of the self. This intersection is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis, and it features spectacularly in one of this book’s most startling moments, where Burke describes a bizarre item in Freud’s collection of antiquities:

Purchased in 1933, Freud’s mummy bandages must have been an especially thrilling acquisition. Stained by the aromatic embalming ointments used to preserve the bodies of the dead, the bandages are delicate, ghoulish, tactile and informative. Messages from the tomb, they carry the imprint of death and are as close to the visceral reality of ancient Egypt as Freud ever got.

That comment is typical of this highly engaging book: thoughtful, stylish, and resonant. The Gods of Freud manages to be at once scholarly and accessible; Burke maintains perfect pitch throughout, writing with a finely judged awareness of how much needs to be explained to readers who aren’t necessarily engrossed by either antiquities or psychoanalysis, but are sufficiently interested by and informed about these topics to be reading this book in the first place.

Freud began to collect antiquities immediately after the death of his father, but this potent fact, and what it suggests about his own psyche, signposts a road he never chose to go down. Burke has several suggestions about the notion of collection as mourning, but she doesn’t labour the point either: her main mission is not to psychoanalyse Freud but to examine his habits and tastes as a collector, and to describe and discuss the growing family of assorted gods, monsters, totems and tokens that he kept on the desk in his study.

Freud’s collection, she says, is ‘an intriguing catalogue of world civilisations where objects rare and sacred, useful and arcane, ravaged and lovely are on display’, including ‘Hellenistic statues, images of the Sphinx, erotic Roman charms, luxurious Persian carpets and Chinese jade lions no bigger than a baby’s fist’. The collection lived in his study where Freud could look at it while he worked: he bought, sold, swapped, gave away and rearranged his treasures almost until the day he died, and by 1938 ‘could barely move in his study because of the number of antiquities’.

Burke is an art historian by profession, but this book is also a particular kind of biography, taking a wide sweep across a range of subjects: not just art history or Freud’s life and work, but also facts about and theories of collecting, antiquities, Egyptian history, Greek mythology, and the history of the twentieth century, with developed insights into those other giants of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and Anna Freud.

Burke’s real focus in the book is the way that all these different things interact, and she keeps coming back to a handful of basic ideas: the way that personal and historical events in Freud’s life formed and affected his habits and acquisitions as a collector; the paradox that a man calling himself ‘a godless Jew’ should surround himself with images of figures from religion and myth; and the parallels between archaeology and psychoanalysis, with their common project of investigating the past.

There are some who cannot hear his name without declaring that they ‘don’t believe in’ Freud, as though he were the Easter Bunny; there are others who feel they must take up a position on him, either for or against, as though he were, say, Collingwood. Burke sensibly eschews all such weirdness and goes for a tone at once affectionate and cool, demonstrating the power of some of Freud’s ideas and calmly pointing out the weaknesses of others – an enterprise in which her long-standing practice as a feminist thinker and scholar is sometimes of considerable help to her, as here: ‘The construction of the Oedipus complex shows Freud at his most imaginative and reductive, coupling his universalising tendency, which made him long for the grand idea, with a neat, epigrammatic solution. In formulating the theory, Freud erased the Sphinx, the tricky, troublesome feminine.’

Freud collected different images of the Sphinx, says Burke, ‘as if exploring the various meanings she offered’. Here, as elsewhere, the discussion is framed in terms of the triangular relationship between Freud, his work, and his antiquities, but the focus always returns to the collection, and some of Burke’s descriptions of Freud’s ‘old and grubby gods’ serve as a reminder that her career has included the publication of prize-winning fiction. A print of Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx hung in Freud’s consulting room ‘near the couch, where he could contemplate it as he decoded his patients’ conundrums’ – he may have left the Sphinx out of his theory, but she seems to have been quite central to this practice – and Burke describes it as depicting ‘a handsome, curly-haired Oedipus, with athletic thighs and deliciously realised muscles. Naked, he leans towards the Sphinx, his outstretched finger close enough to stroke her firm little breasts with their erect nipples, while she reaches towards him with her paw … Though a grisly arrangement of bones and a foot in the lower left corner indicate the fate of previous riddlers, Ingres’ scene offers no sense of threat.’

Freud, with his ‘dogged little clenched fist of a face beneath a towering skull’, is brought almost alarmingly to life: brilliant, funny, endearingly vulnerable and harmlessly vain, firmly tied to his time and class, and yet a giant figure in the history of human thought. The end of the book, which describes the consequences for the Freud family of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and their flight to London the same year, makes for traumatic reading, but it also shows Freud’s extraordinary resilience and courage. By then he was eighty-two years old and dying of cancer, but when two of his children suggested in despair that perhaps the best thing for them, as Jews, was to kill themselves, he retorted, ‘Why? Because they would like us to?’ He feared with good reason that he would never be able to take his treasured antiquities out of Austria, but thanks to a combination of good fortune and good friends, the entire collection was shipped to London along with the family, and he was able, during the brief time that remained to him, to contemplate his ‘old and grubby gods’ once more. ‘Remarkably, nothing had been broken, lost or stolen.’