The British architect David Chipperfield is either blazing a restoration trail or sabotaging old buildings, depending on which Berliner you listen to.

He is rebuilding a part of Germany's equivalent of the Louvre — the war-damaged Museum Island complex. Chipperfield's project, the Neues Museum, is the third of five museums to be renovated, and will house Berlin's Egyptian collection, including the 14th century B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti. It will cost 233 million euros ($329 million) to complete and won't open until 2009. Berliners got a preview in an open house from Sept. 22-24 [2007].

The Neues Museum was left to decay after suffering bomb damage in World War II. Chipperfield, 53, is conserving everything that remained without replicating what was destroyed. He is filling in the gaps with a sparse, contemporary style and modern materials — a blend that has won both friends and foes...

Nefertiti's New Berlin Home Wins British Architect Fans, Foes, Catherine Hickley, Bloomberg, UK, September 27, 2007.

Freud was a collector of antiquities — Roman, Greek, and especially Egyptian. He had assembled several thousand, mostly small sculptures, by the time he was forced to flee Vienna for London and was pleased that he was able to take them with him. They filled his consultation room, covered his desk, accompanied him on his summer vacations, and he loved to handle them. As a small boy, he collected toy soldiers, and Burke speculates that their size, easy to fit in the hand, determined the size of the objects he later collected (p. 182).

He lived in the era of great archaeological exploration — Schliemann unearthed Troy when Freud was 15; Evans excavated Minos at Knossos on Crete when he was in his forties, and Carter discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb when he was in his sixties. He compared psychoanalysis with archaeology in a series of metaphors that evolved and became more sophisticated over the years — from uncovering a concealed past to constructing a plausible model of what might have been, consistent with the fragments that had been preserved to recognizing the way in which remnants of varying epochs can become intermixed and the record difficult to dissect.

This would seem to provide an opportunity for an interesting perspective on Freud’s thinking, the way in which his passionate avocation influenced his ideas, and the subtitle of this book’ Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis, promises just that. Unfortunately, the book itself misses the mark...

, Janine Burke, Walker & Company, 2006, pp. 284.

The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis, Janine Burke, The American Journal of Psychiatry, New York, USA, 164:1620, doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2007.07081291, October 2007.