ART REVIEW : The Sigmund Freud Collection--It’s a Freudian Dream : Like any passionate art collector, the father of psychoanalysis was fueled by motives so deep he could not have explained them himself.

In March, 1938, the Nazis marched into Vienna. By May they were rounding up Jews to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes or to be packed off to the camps. At Berggasse 19, tension mounted as Sigmund Freud’s family prepared to flee Austria. His daughter, Anna, was exercising guile worthy of Metternich to persuade the SS to give her father Unbedenklichkeitserklarung , the official document that would allow him to emigrate to England.

The father of psychoanalysis was 82 and ailing. His rabid fondness for cigars had finally given him cancer of the mouth. His palate had been surgically removed and replaced with a prosthesis that caused him unremitting pain. With his life at stake, the old man still found time to worry about a matter others would have forgotten in such extremity: Would his art collection be saved?

Freud started collecting in 1896, the year his father died. By the time the Nazis arrived, he had more than 2,000 small antique works--Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Near-Eastern and Asian. They crammed his comfortable consulting room and office. For him they were powerful symbols of his work and treasured old friends. Touchingly, he kept rows of figures ever before him on his desk as a king might keep a council of elders--or a boy rows of favorite model soldiers.

Finally, on May 23, he could write to a friend that the collection had been released for a minimal levy of about $100. He was free. The beloved compendium was reassembled in the Freuds’ new London digs at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Freud would have a year to be consoled by it before he died.

Today, the stolid brick London house is the Freud Museum. The antiquities it contains were not his only artistic legacy. His grandson Lucien Freud still lives in London and is regarded among the world’s leading figurative painters.

A traveling exhibition of 65 works from Freud’s collection opens today at UC Irvine (to Dec. 16). Put together by museum director Richard Wells and art historian Lynn Gamwell, it is a show that resonates well beyond its own modest proportions and should attract anyone interested in either art or psychology.

Actually, it requires a considerable effort of ignorance to be interested in one and not the other. Many shrinks will admit their craft is more art than science. Most artists will readily confess that the end result of their labors is not so much the physical artwork as its emotional impact first on themselves, then on the viewer.

Does a work of art really exist if no one sees it? Why does it exist when someone does see it?

Because, I suppose, our minds are unruly cellars cluttered with remembered images--images of things, feelings and events. When we see a work of art, the mind matches it up with those matrix images and we respond. In a way, we all have an art collection pre-existent in our heads. If we put together a real collection of objects, it is predictably the projection of our mindscape and our dreams.

It’s really all rather Freudian. Ironically, Freud’s collection of archetypal objects tends to confirm the theories of his one-time follower Carl Jung. At this distance, disagreements in doctrine between members of the Freud circle do seem tiresomely petty.

Freud had a classical education. Significantly, he did not collect primitive art, but art from civilizations he had studied. He had a pretty good eye although he bought several fakes, like a forged Chinese camel in Tang style and a bogus Egyptian New Kingdom wall relief on view here.

The art critic Roger Fry claimed that Freud didn’t understand the formal underpinnings of aesthetic pleasure. That probably proves that Fry didn’t understand the profound emotional foundations of aesthetic pleasure.

At his best, Freud found objects that carry emotional authenticity and--aside from their powerful symbolic value--objects with nuanced delicacy. There is a lovely freshness about a Greek Hellenistic Eros figure and great sensitivity of carving in an Egyptian Ptolemaic donation stele. Two tiny Roman Hellenistic heads concentrate ferocious emotion.

But that’s not the point. Like any passionate collector, Freud was fueled by motives so deep he could not have explained them himself. That’s saying something, considering his claim to have been the only man to ever successfully psychoanalyze himself.

As a youth, Freud admired and envied Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer and excavator of ancient Troy. Schliemann gave reality to a city thought to exist only in legend. Freud gave reality to a part of the human mind believed equally fictional. In his practice, Freud saw himself as an archeologist of the mind unearthing lost fragments of memory and trying to fit them once again into a coherent whole. The archeological metaphor was so persuasive that psychotherapists use it to this day, furnishing their own offices with magical objects. Shamanism lives.

Imagine how Freud must have regarded his little late-Egyptian bronze of Isis suckling the infant Horus. He would have known the mythical story of how Isis’ husband Osiris was killed by a jealous brother, hacked into 14 pieces and scattered across the land. Isis found the dismembered pieces, put them back together, made Osiris the first mummy and coupled with it to produce the infant Horus. The child was raised in secret until he was old enough to avenge the father.

Very Freudian.

Freud adored his mother and envied his father. When he learned of the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, he decided his own impulse was universal and identified the most famous of his complexes. A Greek terra cotta Sphinx memorializes the moment when Oedipus outwits the winged lion-woman by answering her riddle.

Many of his cherished objects bore directly on personal experiences, such as a falcon-headed figure that reminded him of a childhood dream. Janus-faced heads reflect his interest in human dualities, including his claim that we are fundamentally bisexual. His interest in the duality of instinct and reason reflect in one of the collection’s most beautiful works, an Egyptian-Roman “Baboon of Thoth”--the animal god of intellectual purity.

Freud had mixed and sometimes conventional notions about women. The driving narcissism he claimed to find in them is embodied in a Roman bronze Venus admiring herself in a glass. The power he felt in them shows in figures of goddesses of aggression such as Athena and Artemis.

Freud was certainly among the most influential half-dozen thinkers of the century. His ideas have been attacked, ridiculed, revised and revered until lesser people have declared us in a “Post-Freudian” era.

Certainly, Freud did not get it all right. But his real achievement comes across in the extraordinary reverberations of his collection. Perhaps because we know these things were his, we are reminded they have meaning beyond their formal properties. They do what art is supposed to do and what Freud tried to revitalize in reality. They broadcast the unseen things which--once grasped--give life a profound vitality.