(2 of 3)
Freud believed that "it is impossible to imagine our own death," and that "this may even be the secret of heroism." He also attributed the birth of religion to "illusions projected outward" by those who were living in the face of death. According to Freud, the ambivalence that men still feel at the death of someone close must have been experienced by primitive man. "It was beside the dead body of someone he loved," wrote Freud, "that he invented spirits, and his sense of guilt at his satisfaction, mingled with his sorrow, turned these newborn spirits into evil demons that had to be dreaded. His persisting memory of the dead became the basis for assuming other forms of existence and gave him the conception of life continuing after apparent death."
Perhaps the best known of Freud's theories about death is the concept of a death instinct, which he formulated in 1920. Freud was certain that "the aim of all life is death." But he also believed that the death wish was balanced by Eros, a loving, positive drive that seeks to preserve life. "Could it be," Schur asks, "that uncovering a 'death instinct' permitted Freud to live with the reality of death?"
If so, the theory of the death instinct must have been especially helpful to Freud after the spring of 1923. On April 25 of that year, he wrote Jones: "I detected two months ago a leucoplastic growth on my jaw and palate which I had removed on the 20th. I was assured of the benignity of the matter. My own diagnosis had been epithelioma"—or cancer. He was right. In all, there were to be 33 operations on his mouth, most done with anesthetics that did not entirely eliminate pain; in one case, the usually stoic Freud interrupted his surgeon, Hans Pichler, with the words, "I cannot take any more." In 1926, "a 'typical' year with no major surgical procedures, just the unceasing attempt to achieve a bare minimum of comfort," Schur reports, there were 48 office visits to Pichler, one biopsy, two cauterizations of new lesions, and continual experiments to improve three different prostheses.
These devices replaced tissues removed in Freud's mutilating operations. His once eloquent speech was impaired, and he wrote to a colleague, "My way of eating does not permit any onlookers." The close fit of the prostheses produced sores and pain, relieved only by aspirin and locally applied analgesics. Freud was opposed to drugs that might cloud his mind.