Freud by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393328615
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

WHILE FREUD FOUND his daughter a supportive, indeed necessary partner, his state of mind understandably fluctuated. Writing to Otto Rank in April 1924, he complained somewhat irritably that Abraham lacked all insight into his condition: “He hopes that my ‘indisposition’ will soon be overcome,” and simply “will not believe that with me it is a new, reduced program of life and work.” Freud admitted to Ernest Jones in September that he was doing some work, but it was “of a secondary order”—an autobiographical sketch. “There is no fresh scientific interest now aloof.” Indeed, in May 1925, he described himself to Lou Andreas-Salomé as being gradually encrusted by insensibility. This was in the nature of things “a kind of beginning of becoming inorganic.” The balance between the drives of life and death, with which he was then occupied, was gradually shifting toward death. He had just “celebrated” his sixty-ninth birthday. Yet eight years later, when he was seventy-seven, he could still impress his patient Hilda Doolittle with his vitality. “The Professor told me a few days ago,” H. D. noted in her journal, “that if he lived another fifty years, he would still be fascinated and curious about the vagaries and variations of the human mind or soul.” Certainly, it was his curiosity that kept him at work even after his cancer operations—at work and thus alive. Not long after these operations, in mid-October 1923, he had hoped to be back analyzing in November, but Pichler’s follow-up surgery made that date unrealistic. He did not begin seeing patients until January 2, 1924, and then “only” six of them a day. Soon he would add that seventh patient, Anna.

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