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Flight to Freedom. Long after the Nazis had attained power in Germany, Freud refused to consider moving from Vienna. Not until after the 1938 Anschluss, when Brownshirts clomped into his apartment and Jones, thanks to extraordinary maneuvering, appeared by chartered plane from Prague, did Freud agree to go to England. To arrange the trip it took three months and all of Jones's influence with highly placed Britons, plus an assist from U.S. Ambassador to France William C. Bullitt and possibly a word from Franklin Roosevelt and Mussolini as well. Freud's ailing heart, buoyed by nitroglycerin, stood the journey well, and he was received in London like a conqueror—as befitted a man who during the trip had dreamed that he was landing at Pevensey, where William the Conqueror landed in 1066. Later Freud was so delighted with his new home and garden that he told Jones: "I am almost tempted to cry out 'Heil Hitler!''
Two years before his flight, Freud had undergone two more exceptionally painful operations. But in London, at 82, Freud had so far recovered as to be doing four analyses daily. In February 1939 unmistakable cancer was again found, and this time the surgeons labeled the case "inoperable, incurable."
Freud hated to take drugs, and had rarely used them throughout his years of pain. Now he consented to take aspirin occasionally. On Sept. 21 he asked his physician, Max Schur, for a sedative: "It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense." Two days later, aged 83, he was dead.
Magic & Death Wishes. Biographer Jones, for all his hero worship, belongs to the warts-and-all school, and notes some strange quirks in Freud's character: ¶ Despite his insistence that he was a scientist first and last, Freud clung stubbornly to Lamarck's idea that acquired traits can be inherited—which to serious scientists now makes no more sense than the notion that the earth is flat. ¶ Throughout his life, Freud dabbled with occultism and telepathy. He narrowly avoided publishing acceptance of some weird, spiritistic rigmarole, but he made it plain in private that he believed there was a good deal in it. ¶ Freud believed in the magic of numbers. In early life he greatly admired the theory of a close friend, Wilhelm Fliess, that important things happened to men in cycles of 23 and 28 days, kept harking back to this even after he had broken angrily with Fliess. He was obsessed with the numbers 61 and 62, was long convinced that he would die at one of those ages. After he passed 62 he raised it to 85½, the age at which his father and half-brother had died.
Says Jones: "The theme of death, the dread of it and the wish for it, had always been a continual preoccupation of Freud's mind as far back as we know anything about it." Freud's reactions to his mother's death at 95 were unusual. She had been in great pain, so he was glad of her release. Beyond that, he was relieved that now he was free to die without causing her grief—he had always, he said, been afraid that he might die first and cause her suffering. Freudian Jones sees in this an unanalytic rationalization, suggests that unconsciously Freud could not bear the possibility of death unless through it he could rejoin his mother, to whom he was deeply and Oedipally attached.