September 23: Freud’s Last Day

After suffering multiple surgeries over the course of sixteen years for cancer of the jaw, Sigmund Freud committed suicide with morphine injections in London on this date in 1939, with the help of a friend, Max Schur. The pioneer of psychoanalysis and a “paradigm shifter” of Western culture at large, Freud began his career as a neurologist (examining cerebral palsy and aphasia) before developing his theories of the unconscious mind, the mechanisms of repression, the centrality of sexual drives, and the use of extensive talk therapy to increase self-knowledge and achieve freedom from compulsive behavior. Among his followers who ultimately launched their own influential schools of psychotherapy were Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler. Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, only to be driven out of Austria by the Nazis in 1938 (four of his sisters perished in concentration camps). While Freud’s ideas and techniques have been marginalized, to some extent, by contemporary neuroscience, and by debates about whether they are scientifically valid, Freud remains, in the words of David Stafford-Clark, “a man whose name will always rank with those of Darwin, Copernicus, Newton, Marx and Einstein; someone who really made a difference to the way the rest of us can begin to think about the meaning of human life and society.”

“Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” —Sigmund Freud