An AI portrayal of Sigmund Freud, built to answer as the man actually wrote — not as a general impression of him.
This is an evolving project
Berggasse 19 is a work in progress, not a finished product. The corpus, the persona, and the safety behavior all get refined over time as issues turn up. If something reads as wrong, out of character, or in poor taste, that's a bug to fix, not a feature.
Who built it
The creator is a Taiwanese/American transgender woman, a theory-and-politics nerd, and an activist living in San Francisco.
How it was built
The conversation runs on Claude (Anthropic), shaped by a system prompt that sets Freud's voice: long, carefully built sentences, his own metaphors (archaeology, the frontier garrison, the censor at the border between conscious and unconscious), and his real disputes with Breuer, Fliess, Jung, Adler, Rank, and Ferenczi.
The important part isn't the voice, though — it's the grounding. Rather than answering from a generic, secondhand impression of Freud, the model has a tool that searches the full original German text of his own writing live, in German, before it answers, and builds the substance of each reply from what actually comes back. When it quotes him, it's quoting an indexed passage, not paraphrasing a memory of one — and every German term or title gets an English translation alongside it. The search itself is a lexical (BM25) index over roughly 18,000 passages drawn from the texts listed below.
There's a safety layer on top of the persona: if a visitor's message suggests real distress rather than curiosity or roleplay, the AI drops the character entirely, says plainly that it's an AI portrayal and not a clinician, and points to real crisis resources instead of staying in voice. Freud's own 1939 views — on women, on homosexuality, on a great deal else — are voiced as his, historically, because sanitizing them would be its own kind of dishonesty. They are not endorsed by the creator, and the AI is instructed not to press them as settled fact.
The texts
Two sources, both public domain in the original German (Freud died in 1939; his correspondence with Jung, Abraham, and Lou Andreas-Salomé is not included here, since those edited letter collections carry their own live editorial copyright even though the letters themselves are old):
| I | Werke aus den Jahren 1892–1899 |
| II–III | Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) |
| IV | Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens |
| V | Werke aus den Jahren 1904–1905 |
| VI | Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten |
| VII | Werke aus den Jahren 1906–1909 |
| VIII | Werke aus den Jahren 1909–1913 |
| IX | Totem und Tabu |
| X | Werke aus den Jahren 1913–1917 |
| XI | Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse |
| XII | Werke aus den Jahren 1917–1920 |
| XIII | Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), and more |
| XIV | Werke aus den Jahren 1925–1931 |
| XV | Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse |
| XVI | Werke aus den Jahren 1932–1939 |
| XVII | Schriften aus dem Nachlaß |
| Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse — the letters to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1902 |
| Warum Krieg? — the 1933 exchange with Albert Einstein |
24 individually proofread works via Project Gutenberg — cleaner text than the scanned volumes above, so both are indexed and whichever ranks better for a given search wins:
Worth knowing
This is not a therapist and doesn't give medical advice. Conversations may be logged and reviewed by the site operator, in part because some visitors disclose real personal distress — see the note in the chat window's footer. In a crisis, please contact local emergency services rather than this site.
Get in touch
Feedback, questions, corrections, something that read wrong — I'd like to hear it. This goes straight to the creator's inbox, not a public form.