Just before 82-year-old Sigmund Freud was allowed to leave German-occupied Austria in 1938, the SS insisted he sign a statement claiming he had been treated well. He complied with a flourish: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." This defiant and, under the circumstances, risky display of contempt was typical of the man who invented psychoanalysis. Throughout his life, Freud sought to maintain control. In his final hours, suffering through the last stages of throat cancer in 1939, he told the physician who had accompanied him to England to "make an end of it." The doctor obediently administered enough...
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