The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his family were forced to move out from Vienna in 1938 for “racial reasons”. The plan to emigrate went hand in hand with efforts to transfer the collection, library, and furniture of the family abroad – among them the desk chair in Freud’s study. The piece accompanied Freud into exile in London. Reconstructions and reminiscences, invocations and visitations mark out the possibilities and impossibilities of giving a historical narrative of this displacement.