Freud would have a field day analyzing the kooks behind this bizarre caper.
London cops are hunting burglars who tried to steal the ashes of the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud from a city crematorium.
The Metropolitan Police said a 2,300-year-old Greek urn containing the remains of Freud and his wife Martha was severely damaged in the break-in at Golders Green Crematorium on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.
Detective Constable Daniel Candler on Wednesday called the attempted theft “a despicable act,” though cops also think the thieves may have been after the valuable urn instead of the ashes.
The father of psychoanalysis moved to Britain from Nazi-controlled Austria in 1938 and died in London in September 1939 at age 83.
The urn had been on public display since Freud was cremated at Golders Green that year.
When his widow died in 1951 at the age of 90, her ashes were added to the urn, which was a gift from one of his wealthy patients, Princess Marie Bonaparte, great grandniece of Napoleon, The Guardian reported.
No precise value was given for the damaged pottery.
“Even leaving aside the financial value of the irreplaceable urn, and the historical significance of to whom it related, the fact that someone set out to take an object knowing it contained the last remains of a person defies belief,” said Candler.
Experts called the urn irreplaceable.
“It had been in his study for many years in Vienna, before the Nazi occupation forced the family exodus to England, to which he came, as he said, to die in freedom,” said Lisa Appignanesi, a writer.