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 (International Universities Press; $20), 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.