It was Sept. 21, 1939. Taking the hand of the physician at his bedside,
Sigmund Freud said, “My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first
talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it
is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more.” Schur reassured
his patient that he had not forgotten. “When he was again in agony, I
gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt
relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. I repeated this dose after about
twelve hours. He lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again.” Thus the death of the founder of psychoanalysis is recalled by his
physician Max Schur in a new book, Freud: Living and Dying
, completed just before Schur's
own death in 1969. Addressed to both laymen and professionals, the book
is at the same time a portrait of Freud's last 16 years, when he was
waging a losing battle with cancer, and a study of his views on death
as they developed throughout his life. Freud was a man unusually preoccupied with death. His concern stemmed
partly from the painful heart attacks he suffered when he was still in
his 30s. The ailment, never definitively diagnosed, was the cause of
continuing anxiety. Indeed, Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Freud's most
authoritative biographer, thought that the symptoms themselves were due
to “anxiety hysteria,” while Schur believed that Freud may actually
have had a coronary thrombosis. Freud was also profoundly affected by
the deaths in his own family, beginning with that of his brother Julius
when Freud was only 19 months old. When his daughter Sophie died, he
spoke of “the monstrous fact of children dying before their parents.”
On the death of Sophie's son at the age of four, he mourned:
“Everything has lost its meaning for me.” Oedipal Conflict. Yet to Freud, a father's death was always “the most
important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.” His own
father died when Freud was 40. The complexity of his grief was related
to his work at that period: just after his father's last illness, Freud
became aware of the Oedipal conflict and the “ambivalence in man's
relationship to beloved and revered parents.” Today, thanks to Freud, most people may not be overly shocked when they
find themselves harboring occasional death wishes toward their parents.
But to Freud the idea was new and guilt-laden. It accounted in part for
his obsession with his own death, for he believed that the fear of
death is usually the result of guilt feelings. At the same time, it was
this kind of theorizing —the treatment of death not as an inner,
emotional preoccupation but as an external, scientific problem—that
helped him to master his anxiety.
