Sigmund Freud's drawings of his early rooms: A prelude to the founding spaces of psychoanalysis.

This article examines the early living and working spaces of Sigmund Freud from 1875 to 1885, prior to his well-known consulting room and study at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, to explore how these environments shaped his spatial and psychical development. Drawing on Freud's letters, drawings, and biographical sources, it analyzes seven rooms he inhabited during his university education and medical internship, highlighting his deliberate arrangement of personal objects and spatial divisions that reflected his inner life and emerging professional identity. The study reveals Freud's early practice of creating private, symbolic spaces—such as his family "cabinet" and hospital rooms—where he combined memory, imagination, and control over his surroundings, prefiguring his later extensive collection of antiquities used in psychoanalysis. These formative spaces illustrate Freud's evolving relationship with his environment as both a physical and psychical entity, underscoring the significance of spatiality in his intellectual and emotional life.