Word: freude
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...