Signed Freud papers set to go on auction

Feeling anxious you didn’t buy your shrink a Hanukkah gift? Lie down on the couch and try bidding on two documents signed by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, that will go on the block later this week at a Los Angeles auction house.

Freud’s handwritten physician’s oath and an “exceptionally rare” letter about dream interpretation will go up for sale at the Nate D. Sanders Auctions on Thursday.

The two-page document bears the text of the oath, followed by handwritten statements by doctors at the hospital testifying on Freud’s behalf.

The minimum bid for Freud’s oath starts at a cool $195,000.

The famed Austrian doctor signed the physician’s oath just before he turned 27, on April 30, 1883, at Vienna’s General Hospital. A year earlier before he started working at the hospital as a clinical assistant to psychiatrist Theodor Meynert, starting a five-decade career in which he developed psychoanalysis and modern psychiatry. He left Vienna General in 1886 to begin a private practice.

The auction house refused to disclose any information about the owner of the documents or how they came to be in their possession.

Freud, born to Jewish parents in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1856, fled Vienna for England when Nazi Germany took over in 1938. He died a few weeks after World War II broke out a year later.

The 1935 letter on dreams, the subject of his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams, considered his masterpiece, addresses the subject of the duration of dreams, the explanation of which, he tells the recipient, is “at present unsettled.”

Bidding on the letter starts at just $95,000.

Both documents are said to be in good condition.

Autographed Freud letters sold at auction in 2012 for $13,000, $9,500 and $14,000.

Among the other documents going on the block are a letter from the Dachau concentration camp dated June 14, 1942, a royal degree from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain from 14 May 1491 that guarantees a Spanish soldier may keep land confiscated from a Muslim, an autographed letter by Charles Darwin, and a letter bearing Italian physicist Galileo Galilei’s earliest known signature.