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His speech became nasal and thick, like a cleft-palate victim's. Damage to the Eustachian tube and repeated infections left him almost deaf on the right side, where he had been accustomed to placing patients, so that his chair and analytic couch had to be transposed. Hardly intelligible in German, he could not surmount the added difficulties of a foreign tongue (though he had spoken English and French fluently), observed to famed Singer Yvette Guilbert: "Meine Prothese spricht nicht französisch [My prosthesis does not speak French]."
Exhaustive Author Jones counts no fewer than 33 operations (plus endless Xray, radium and diathermy treatments) over the next 16 years. One of the more unusual operations: Freud had himself sterilized (by tying off the major sperm ducts) on the chance that a changed hormone production might retard the growth of the cancer. There is no evidence that it had any such effect.
Financial Troubles. Immediately after World War I, Freud had virtually no income. His savings (about $30,000) were swept away by inflation. He was grateful for two patients, one American, one British, sent by Jones; though they paid only the half-rate fee of $5 a session, he admitted that without them he could not make ends meet. There were times when Freud could have made big money easily. In 1920 he had an offer of $1,000 each for articles in Cosmopolitan, huffily turned it down because the editors told him what they wanted him to write about: "The Wife's Mental Place in the Home." In 1924 Colonel "Bertie" McCormick cabled Tribune Staffman George Seldes:
OFFER FREUD 25,000 DOLLARS OR ANYTHING HE NAME COME CHICAGO PSYCHOANALYZE LEOPOLD AND LOEB. For the same purpose, Hearst also offered Freud "any sum he cared to name" and also "was prepared to charter a special liner so that Freud could travel quite undisturbed by other company." Freud's refusals were chilling.
Aside from lack of money, the deprivation that most troubled Freud in postwar Vienna involved cigars. Imported ones were unobtainable in near-bankrupt Austria, so visiting analysts smuggled them in. Though he knew that his jaw cancer might have been caused by smoking, Freud would not quit on that account. With his shrunken tissues and "the monster" interfering, he sometimes had to pry his mouth open with a clothespin to get the cigar in. Even so, he enjoyed up to four a day. At one time, when he had heart trouble marked by anginal pain, he quit smoking and boasted of this "act of autotomy," but he stuck it out only 23 days. Disciple Sandor Ferenczi, a Hungarian analyst who was in the process of losing his own mind, offered to go to Vienna to psychoanalyze Freud out of his angina—which, Ferenczi was sure, was merely psychosomatic. Freud was touched by the offer but declined it.
Breaking Ranks. As Freud's fame grew and his basic ideas came to be ever more widely accepted, he collected some minor honors, but time and again influential friends failed to get him the Nobel Prize, and he soon urged them to stop chasing "the Nobel chimera." He remained fanatically convinced that he had discovered absolute truths, and excoriated the defectors from his ranks.