Behavior: Freud and Death

(3 of 3)

His ability "to love, to give, to feel stayed with him to the end," and his creativity endured; in his last years he wrote some of his most significant papers, most of them not noticeably influenced by his illness. An exception was Civilization and Its Discontents. Its tone is profoundly pessimistic, reflecting, Schur says, Freud's suffering, "which was draining his resources" and "depleting his capacity to enjoy life." Schur's belief is reinforced by a letter of Freud's admitting that "since I myself no longer have much vital energy, the whole world seems to me doomed to destruction." That feeling never tempted Freud to turn to God. On the contrary, a paper written in 1932 reaffirmed his disbelief in religion and his faith in science because it "takes account of our dependence on the real, external world." Still very much a part of that world, Freud saw patients in London until a few weeks before he died at 83.

For anyone who suffered as Freud did, Schur observes, the wish to die was bound to be "in a precarious balance" with the wish to live. When the Nazis entered Vienna and prospects for the Freud family to escape appeared dim, his daughter Anna asked whether it might not be better to kill themselves. Freud's reply: "Why? Because they would like us to?" Eventually the longing to end the struggle became uppermost, but Schur did not see that as defeat. His book ends with words that Freud himself had written many years earlier: "Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task."