LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DIGITIZES SIGMUND FREUD COLLECTION

The Library of Congress has made 20,000 letters, interviews, and artifacts from the personal and professional life of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, available online for the first time, Tara Bahrampour of the Washington Post reports. Digitizing the extensive collection took the institution nearly two years.

Margaret McAleer, senior archives specialist at the Library of Congress, said Freud’s letters to his finance Martha Bernays are among the treasures in the library’s holdings. The documents convey many of the Austrian scholar’s early interests, including his obsession with cocaine and its potential medicinal uses. “The next time you see me you will see a big, wild man with cocaine in his body,” Freud wrote in a letter to Bernays in 1884.

The library began collecting material related to Freud in 1952 after the Sigmund Freud archives made a significant donation. While the digital archive contains interviews that were never made available before, researchers will no longer be permitted to handle the original documents, a precautionary measure taken to prevent deterioration. The project was funded by the Polonsky Foundation, a cultural heritage nonprofit in the UK.