Free association

Here is Sigmund Freud seated among the greenery outside The Tavistock Clinic in north London, one of the world's most prestigious centres of the style of psychoanalytic therapy and training for which he was chiefly responsible.

Just last week his grandson Lucien Freud, one of the greatest of contemporary painters, died at the age of 88. Born in Austria, he and his family escaped in 1933 from rising Nazism, to London where he spent most of the remainder of his highly creative life.

In 1938 Sigmund also escaped (just) from the Nazis, who were burning his books, and settled in Maresfield Gardens, close to where this statue stands, until he died of cancer the following year, aged 83.

Opposite this spot stands Hampstead High School for Girls, where my mother was a pupil. In 1940 she and my father escaped from the London blitz to a small cottage in Wales. (My Russian father, as a stateless person, was not eligible to serve in the war.)

The statue is by the sculptor Oscar Nemon, a Croatian Jew who met Freud in Vienna and created this work in 1931. In 1938 he too escaped from the Nazis and settled near Oxford. His daughter Electra was at school with me. She later married the lead singer of The Pretty Things, a 60s band who are still performing today - minus one member who died of cancer and another who died of a drug overdose.

Not too far away from here the inimitable singer and performer Amy Winehouse died last Saturday, aged 27, probably as a result of her alcohol and drug addictions. Sadly, as far as we know she was never able to get clean enough to make use of the sort of help available at the Tavistock Clinic.

Free association is a remarkable thing. Devised by Sigmund Freud.