Statuette of the goddess Venus

This statue, probably from a Roman province in France or the Rhineland, is of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. Nude from the waist up, she holds her hair in one hand and a mirror in the other. Marie Bonaparte, a close friend of Freud’s, purchased this figure for him in 1938 from a Parisian antiques dealer named Ségrédakis.

This Venus may have held a special interest for Freud in his theorizing about women. In his essay On Narcissism he states: “[W]e are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in object choice... Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them... The great charm of narcissistic women has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the lover’s dissatisfaction, of his doubts of the woman’s love, of his complaints of her enigmatic nature, has its roots in this incongruity between the types of object-choice.” (SE, 14, pp88-89)