Sigmund Fraud Will See You Now

Alexandra Patterson

Image courtesy of Sigmund Fraud

In a fake bookshop in Bangkok, an anti-therapist invites you to confess your 21^st century anxieties. 

Forget Freud. Bangkok’s Sigmund Fraud isn’t an interpreter of dreams, but a self-styled “psychologist” for the age of burnout and brand deals. A cartoonist for the crisis era, he works almost exclusively in black and white, both hand-painted and digital, distilling modern anxieties into stark and incisive images. His humour is surgical: dry, precise, and devastatingly effective, slicing cleanly through the absurdities of 21st-century life. 

Fraud, who began his career in research and design, knows the glossy polish of commercial culture all too well. But this alter ego, Sigmund Fraud, emerged, as he puts it, as a “serious side project,” a space for unruly ideas and uncomfortable truths, “Criticising capitalism while being caught up in it,”. Perhaps we’re all complicit. Within modern-day consumerism, shaped by spectacle and the pressures to optimise the self, it becomes difficult to remain completely outside the system. 

Recently, Fraud installed his very own fake bookshop inside the Lou Hieb Seng space, tucked into the quiet, historic streets of Tha Tien, in the shadow of Bangkok’s glittering high-rises. A group of young people, bathed in soft light, sit on low stools, chatting around what seems to be a pile of books. But nothing stays sincere for long in Fraud’s world. All the books are hollow, wooden blocks with a cartoon painted in black on one side, and a blurb on the other. They have been produced for existential reflection. The titles are witty and painfully sharp, ‘Time Heals. But also brings new ways to injure yourself mentally’, ‘Existentialist #000100’,’Expect Nothing but Still Disappointed’, ‘Overthinking and Still Making the Worst Decision’. 

Image courtesy of Sigmund Fraud

Despite all the fakery, the creator insists he’s offering something real: “the painful truth of reality,” with humour as his “survival kit.” And it shows. Each illustration on every faux book cuts deeper into the 21st-century psyche. Using satire as a ‘powerful tool’, Fraud exposes the absurdities of Western consumerism, the lack of sustained reading and the cult of online therapists and self-optimisation. His recent sarcastic lines make the point clearly: ‘A Book Club with Only One Book,’ ‘How to Read a Book in the 21st Century,’ and ‘The Magic of Thinking BIG… Inside Their Own Heads’. 

Fraud’s first collection was pointedly titled The Best-Selling Book, an ironic nod to publishing clichés, and it encouraged direct participation. It began, he explains, as a kind of game: visitors were invited to choose their favourite fake title from a list of 20. A fake personality test, built from fake books. The concept quickly evolved. The list grew. There are now over 80 titles, and each one is an absurd mirror reflecting modern neuroses. Positioning himself as a kind of anti-therapist, Fraud creates spaces for quiet confession through fake self-help therapies. The questions are tongue-in-cheek, but the reactions are real. In an age of commercial excess and psychological overload, he draws, quite literally, from a personal sense of disillusionment. He claims that he looks to ‘draw upon the stuff [within society] that makes us feel physically sick’ and that ‘we’re shaped and even sickened by the systems we live in’. In all his fakery, Fraud reflects and critiques a culture so dominated by social media and online performance that even being ‘authentic’ feels faux. 

Image courtesy of Sigmund Fraud

Producing his work in English, the predominant language of the global publishing industry and a marker of the worldwide reach of Western consumerism, he situates himself within the very structures he seeks to critique. ‘It’s a kind of therapy', he says. ‘Processing things through the work, and through conversations with visitors.’ But despite the gallery shows and growing audience, Fraud refuses the label of ‘artist’. An artist, he insists, has technical skills, something he modestly claims to lack. He prefers to see himself as acting as a kind of mediator ‘using art forms to start conversation’. There is no singular ‘me’ in the work of Sigmund Fraud. He does not dictate the meaning of the work, but instead invites us to engage with it on our own terms. In the end, the joke belongs to him, but the meaning belongs to us. 

Image courtesy of Sigmund Fraud

The creator doesn’t aim to speak to everyone, just to reach a few, deeply. Fraud opens a world that’s darkly funny, where we’re left to laugh at the grinding anxiety of life under capitalism’s relentless glare. In a state of disillusionment, he confronts us with the ersatz of modern existence. As we participate in the fakery of Fraud’s ‘book club’, maybe the only real thing that emerges is conversation itself. Finally, he comes back to something genuinely deeply human, our innate urge to connect with each other, and we leave the creator’s bookshop with our feelings stirred and our senses awakened.   Produced in Bangkok, a city saturated with noise, speed, and surface glamour, Fraud is also a product of a wider world in constant flux. In a culture where everything shifts and nothing feels certain, perhaps collective laughter is the last language we truly share. Fraud doesn’t aim for universality, but in highlighting what’s broken, he taps into something quietly and unmistakably shared.