Today, Diane and I visited London's Freud Museum, the house where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life after fleeing Nazi persecution in Vienna in 1938.

The residence in Hampstead in northern London was also home to his daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychology. After Anna Freud's death in 1982, the house was converted into a musuem (Admission: £5).

We live about five minutes' walk from the museum. And, after 3-1/2 years in the neighborhood, finally got around to visiting it (It's like going to see the Statue of Liberty or another sight you take for granted when you live in New York.).

The Freud museum's centerpiece is his ground-floor study and library, which contains THE couch where Freud analyzed patients in Vienna. Along with scores of books, the room contains many of the antiquities the psychoanalyst collected. Freud would sit next to the head of the couch, out of the patient's sight and facing some of these artifacts.

Upstairs, there is a room devoted to Anna Freud. It includes a picture of a 1978 ceremony at Columbia University at which she received an honorary doctorate and was the commencement speaker. And at which I got my master's in journalism. It was a nice surprise to see the photo.