Another New Twitter Header: The curious nature of Freud’s desk

And what is that creepy thing in the corner?

Barely five days after surprising us with a statue of Robert Raikes at the Victoria Embankment Gardens as a twitter, Robert Galbraith switched it for the above picture, quickly identified as a picture of Sigmund Freud’s desk at the Freud museum of London. However, as sharp-eyed Redditors, intrigued by the strange figure on the right-hand desk corner (which resembles nothing so much as a conjoined triplet figurine of Douglas Adams’ Eccentrica Gallumbits) quickly realized, the arrangement is not how Freud’s desk is typically displayed, and certainly did not look like this in 2017, the year we expect much of Sleep Tight, Evangeline, to be set. What’s the difference? Find out after the jump.

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This picture is what the desk typically looks like, and would have contained if Strike or Robin had paid a visit to the museum in 2017.

As you can see, many of the figures are the same, but there are some clear differences, notably the lack of Eccentrica, who is replaced by a white alabaster baboon. The Twitter Header is, instead, from a special exhibit in the museum called Housekeeper, which ran from Oct 29, 2025 to March 1, 2026. As the exhibit description reads:

Working with ghostly aspects of the museum as household, as collection and as archive, artist Cathie Pilkington channels the figure of Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s live-in housekeeper. Through different modes of artistic inhabitation, which include the assigning of her own ‘antiquities’, Pilkington reinterprets Fichtl’s meticulous daily routines as sublimated forms of creativity and agency which reveal striking parallels between their two labours, across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Before looking into Pilkington’s reasons for swapping out some of Freud’s own artefacts, let’s first look why Freud recreated an anthropology museum on his desk in the first place. According to the museum’s description:

A desk is naturally a place to work from, but Freud’s desk was so much more. As Freud returned to his desk after multiple analytic sessions throughout the day, he was met by an audience of faces. Inanimate and silent, the rows of statuettes were Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Chinese, and gazed upon him from centuries and millennia past. A more practical person may have cleared this space for papers, pens, books and other essentials for writing. But for Freud his bronze and ceramic gallery was a key part of his process.

Though these figures did not share their dreams and neuroses with their observer, they certainly contributed to his work. Many of these characters from antiquity appear in Freud’s theories: Athena, Oedipus, Eros, Venus. They inspired him in his exploration of psychoanalytic theories and in his writing process. Some objects on the desk relate to the act of writing itself: a jade scholar screen designed to inspire calm in the scholar; the baboon Thoth, lunar god and patron of all things intellectual, particularly writing; and Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, balancing sound intellect and decisive action.

Today, Freud’s favourite antiquities continue to hold court from the unique vantage point of the dark velvet-topped desk. (Only his favourites made the cut and remained on the desk after their initial purchase). They are joined by a number of other items: cigar boxes, ashtrays and a matchbox to maintain his smoking habit; papers atop a large leather portfolio with pens and a marble letter opener for correspondence; and of course Freud’s wire-rimmed spectacles.

The first thing that should jump out to Strike readers is the presence of Eros and Venus among the authentic figurines, given that we know the myth of Cupid and Psyche is relevant to the story, and we’ve already seen a Persephone head on the charm bracelet. So, why present a picture of Pilkington’s exhibit, when there were undoubtedly pictures available that would have depicted the scene as it would have looked in 2017?

There are a few possibilities:

1. The desk itself will somehow be important to the story; Galbraith visited the museum during the time of the exhibition and took the picture while either unaware of the substitutions or figuring it it didn’t matter if the figures weren’t authentic.

   1. That seems really unlikely, given that Galbraith’s attention to detail and awareness of the fine-toothed comb with which readers pick apart the photographic clues.

2. Galbraith is planning a little creative anachronism, and is going to have our detectives visit a fictional version of the Housekeeper exhibit, magically Time-turnered to 2017.

   1. This is possible. While Galbraith has inserted genuine historical football matches, horse races and arts events* in the narrative, there are also fictional elements, such as the play Death is No Punishment, in which Sacha Legard starred. Walter Loebner and his essay are real; however, no play has ever been made of his life.

   2. I could see JKR/RG visiting the museum, enjoying the exhibit and wanting to incorporate it into the storyline, even in the wrong year.

3. There is some other reason we are supposed to notice that Freud’s desk is not what it should be.

Let’s now take a look at the changes the artist made. Pilkington states her reasons in this article:

The Freud Museum is a rich and loaded space for an artist to work with. There is a charged heaviness to Freud’s study; it feels like a thinking space that travels inwards and backwards. My intervention in Housekeeper begins there — carefully and quietly moving things around, on Freud’s desk and side table. The way the objects are laid out reminds me of a game of chess, ready for the next move. So, I begin a game of swapping out and replacing objects. I do this mischievously, subjectively, using the agency I have as an artist and thinking about the freedom that Paula didn’t have. Some objects fit right in; others are not so demure. There are signs of work in progress, the kinds of traces that a cleaner might leave while she works.

Surely the substitution of the many-breasted woman for the Thoth baboon statue is one of the more noticeable changes, mentioned in multiple reviews of the exhibit and in the official program; it is also one the more salient elements of Galbraith’s header. For that reason, I’m going to focus on that specific substitution.

The Thoth baboon was apparently one of Freud’s favorites. The description on the museum website states:

Thoth was a lunar god in Middle Egypt, and a patron of all things intellectual, particularly writing. Thoth was often represented as a seated baboon as Egyptians believed the baboon was the spirit of the god. This small statue was probably an offering during the Classical Period, when Thoth increased in popularity due to his association with the Greek messenger god, Hermes. As a scribe, Thoth was in charge of the scales at the Weighing of the Heart ceremony, conducted after death to establish the merit and virtue of the dead person. On his head he wears a lunar crescent and disc, associating him with the moon and measurement of time. As god of intellectual pursuits and inventor of hieroglyphs, the baboon of Thoth may have had a special appeal to Freud because of its balance of instinct and intellect. One of Freud’s missions was to reveal the profound influence of instinct (sexuality and aggression) on man’s intellectual achievements. This deity, as the inventor of hieroglyphs, also reminds us of Freud’s interest in the Egyptian language. Freud used the metaphor of a pictorial language (hieroglyphics) to describe the dream-process. Freud was also interested in the conflict between animal instinct and human intellect in Thoth’s representation as a baboon. The Freud family’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl noted he was in the habit of stroking the marble baboon, as he did his own pet dogs.

A few things of note here:

• Thoth is connected to the moon. In alchemy, the moon is an albedo indicator and there are lots of reasons to expect cleansing and purifying transformations for both Strike and Robin in Sleep Tight, Evangeline.

  • A white Thoth statue appears to be an ideal albedo symbol.

• Thoth is also related to writing and drawing, through his connection to hieroglyphics. Per the structural models I have been working with, I expect STE to connect to Book 2 and Book 6, just as THM connected so well to Books 3 and 5.

  • Both The Silkworm and The Ink Black Heart were “text within a text” stories, with the murder victims a writer of erotic novels and writer/illustrators of a Gothic cartoon respectively.

  • Is this an indicator to expect another text-within-a-text story, perhaps relating to a writer or artist?

    • Perhaps even a sculptor this time?

So, what did the critics say about the substitution of Eccentrica (whose real name is El Shaddai, Hebrew for “God Almighty”)? Pages 12-13 of the original program say:

Freud’s desk, with its fixed display of antiquities, is particularly sensitive to change; even small alterations are noticeable. Here, the statuette of the Egyptian god of wisdom Thoth, in his manifestation as a baboon, has been moved from its original place: a many-breasted goddess, standing proudly in its stead. Thoth takes up home in a new corner of the Museum. Can you spot him?

Pages 22-23 feature a sketch of El Shaddai, with the challenge, Can you distinguish Freud’s objects from Pilkington’s?

So, where did the original Thoth wind up in Pilkington’s vision? I of course was never there to see it, but the review from The Observer tells us.

In a final room, Pilkington places a Roman** alabaster statuette of a baboon, among other artefacts, next to her own family heirlooms: Hummel figurines. There is a skiing boy, a girl with a basket, a dog with pleading eyes. A neon Post-it note beneath them reads, in neat script, “Collection of Cathie Pilkington”.

Unfortunately, Pilkington did not tell us exactly what she meant when she swapped out an ancient sculpture that inspired one of the most noted intellectuals in history with a surreally erotic “god”of her own creation, while grouping Freud’s Thoth with her own set of mass-produced “collectables” and claiming it as her own, but it is certainly fodder for imagination. She closes her essay with:

I am really interested in why art can still seem so inaccessible, why some collections survive along with their stories and others are lost, and what conversations the artist’s voice can generate. I hope the exhibition unearths something in the viewer.

As far as connections to the Strike series go, I can’t look at El Shaddai and not think of Robin in Lethal White, confessing to Strike that both Matthew and Geraint Winn made her feel like “a pair of walking tits” and Strike envisioning some “corrective procedures from which he thought Matthew might benefit.” Given that Robin is now in a relationship where she feels defined by her eggs, perhaps we will see an echo there. I am also reminded of The Silkworm, where Liz Tassel planted false evidence in Owen Quine’s study that nearly sent his wife to jail for murder.

Of course, I might be diving down a rabbit hole with all of this. The picture could mean little more than Sigmund Freud somehow being relevant to the story. We know Robin has an appointment with a therapist recommended by Jungian Prudence; is it possible that Dr. Broccoli is a hard-core Freudian? It may well be worth reviewing how the two approaches differ, keeping in mind that both are quite different from the cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that Robin found helpful in her first struggle with PTSD.

In any case, we have a new header, one that, particularly for those of us with an interest in psychology, may be the most thought-provoking we’ve ever seen.

So, fellow readers, anyone want to lie down on the Farting Sofa and tell me what they think?

*In TRG, Robin and Ryan saw a production of The Father that actually ran in the Duke of York theater in March 2016, and turned out to be a great meta-clue pointing to the importance of Jonathan Wace and his two daughters, Abigail and Daiyu.

** I assume this is an error on the magazine's part, given that the museum page lists the statue as Egyptian.