that you say, but how sad!
“Fr.: Why sad? That’s what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.” She was making this dialogue up, of course, but he had often expressed this view—in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.
In spite of his increasing preoccupation with his physical decline, Freud does not want to stop working. Over the years and through all kinds of harrowing treatments, he had seen patients, often taking only a day or two off after his surgeries. In March 1939, in his office in London, when he was weak from brutal radiation treatments, he continued to see his patients without interruption. He was a willing patient, able to tolerate a great deal of pain, up for any chance of prolonging his life, as long as that life was productive.
“The only real dread I have,” he once wrote, “is of a long invalidism with no possibility of working.” The work was worth suffering for; likewise, the discipline and habit of it was sustaining. In some not entirely abstract sense, the patients were healing the doctor.
He does not close his analytic practice until August 1, by which time he is undeniably too weak to continue. At that point, hehas four analytic patients, who come to the house at Maresfield Gardens, and one training analysis. He records their visits and their fees in midnight-blue notebooks. As he writes to a friend, “With all the resignation before destiny that suits an honest man, I have one wholly secret entreaty: only no…paralysis of one’s powers through bodily misery. Let us die in harness, as King Macbeth says.”
And so, even when he closes the practice, the idea lingers
:
“Let us die in harness.” Though he has stopped seeing patients, he has not stopped working. Freud has always used himself in his work. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
, he analyzed his own dreams and childhood. He has very often been the guinea pig, the science experiment, and his own experience and observations feed right into his theories. So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.
Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection. As he had written earlier to Lou Andreas-Salomé: “The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.”
When Schur comes back from a trip to America to work on securing his own visa, Freud is pale and has lost weight. He is coming to resemble one of the finely carved Egyptian statues he keeps on his desk, all whiteness and angle.
In the winter, Leonard and Virginia Woolf came to visit him. Leonard wrote later: “There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something somber, suppressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling which only very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength.”
For a very long time, Anna has taken on the role of nurse; in his illness the two have developed a physical intimacy that transcends the more ordinary intimacy he has with his wife. His illness has burned down and transfigured his love and somehow allowed or permitted him to be closer to his daughter, without the guilt or self-criticism he expressed in the past. It’s as if he is, in extremis, beyond the conventional structures of family life, outside them. He says to Schur in the last weeks, “Destiny was kind to me, that it also granted me a relationship with such a woman—I mean, naturally, Anna.”
Even as a younger man, Freud did not like the idea of prolonging life at all costs. He did not subscribe to any lofty or sentimental ideas about longevity. He did not romanticize suffering in any of its forms. When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote a floridly
“Fr.: Why sad? That’s what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.” She was making this dialogue up, of course, but he had often expressed this view—in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.
In spite of his increasing preoccupation with his physical decline, Freud does not want to stop working. Over the years and through all kinds of harrowing treatments, he had seen patients, often taking only a day or two off after his surgeries. In March 1939, in his office in London, when he was weak from brutal radiation treatments, he continued to see his patients without interruption. He was a willing patient, able to tolerate a great deal of pain, up for any chance of prolonging his life, as long as that life was productive.
“The only real dread I have,” he once wrote, “is of a long invalidism with no possibility of working.” The work was worth suffering for; likewise, the discipline and habit of it was sustaining. In some not entirely abstract sense, the patients were healing the doctor.
He does not close his analytic practice until August 1, by which time he is undeniably too weak to continue. At that point, hehas four analytic patients, who come to the house at Maresfield Gardens, and one training analysis. He records their visits and their fees in midnight-blue notebooks. As he writes to a friend, “With all the resignation before destiny that suits an honest man, I have one wholly secret entreaty: only no…paralysis of one’s powers through bodily misery. Let us die in harness, as King Macbeth says.”
And so, even when he closes the practice, the idea lingers
:
“Let us die in harness.” Though he has stopped seeing patients, he has not stopped working. Freud has always used himself in his work. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
, he analyzed his own dreams and childhood. He has very often been the guinea pig, the science experiment, and his own experience and observations feed right into his theories. So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.
Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection. As he had written earlier to Lou Andreas-Salomé: “The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.”
When Schur comes back from a trip to America to work on securing his own visa, Freud is pale and has lost weight. He is coming to resemble one of the finely carved Egyptian statues he keeps on his desk, all whiteness and angle.
In the winter, Leonard and Virginia Woolf came to visit him. Leonard wrote later: “There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something somber, suppressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling which only very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength.”
For a very long time, Anna has taken on the role of nurse; in his illness the two have developed a physical intimacy that transcends the more ordinary intimacy he has with his wife. His illness has burned down and transfigured his love and somehow allowed or permitted him to be closer to his daughter, without the guilt or self-criticism he expressed in the past. It’s as if he is, in extremis, beyond the conventional structures of family life, outside them. He says to Schur in the last weeks, “Destiny was kind to me, that it also granted me a relationship with such a woman—I mean, naturally, Anna.”
Even as a younger man, Freud did not like the idea of prolonging life at all costs. He did not subscribe to any lofty or sentimental ideas about longevity. He did not romanticize suffering in any of its forms. When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote a floridly
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