SIGMUND FREUD DOB 6/5’ TODAY 9/5
Today, thanks to Freud, most people may not be overly shocked when they find themselves harboring occasional death wishes toward their parents. But to Freud the idea was new and guilt-laden. It accounted in part for his obsession with his own death, for he believed that the fear of death is usually the result of guilt feelings. At the same time, it was this kind of theorizing —the treatment of death not as an inner, emotional preoccupation but as an external, scientific problem—that helped him to master his anxiety. Freud believed that “it is impossible to imagine our own death,” and that “this may even be the secret of heroism.” He also attributed the birth of religion to “illusions projected outward” by those who were living in the face of death. According to Freud, the ambivalence that men still feel at the death of someone close must have been experienced by primitive man. “It was beside the dead body of someone he loved,” wrote Freud, “that he invented spirits, and his sense of guilt at his satisfaction, mingled with his sorrow, turned these newborn spirits into evil demons that had to be dreaded. His persisting memory of the dead became the basis for assuming other forms of existence and gave him the conception of life continuing after apparent death. “If so, the 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 to Jones: “I detected two months ago a leucoplast 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 the words, “I cannot take any more.” In 1926, “a ‘typical’ year with no major surgical procedures, just the unceasing attempt to achieve a bare minimum of comfort,” Schur reports, there were 48 office visits to Pichler, one biopsy, two cauterizations of new lesions, and continual experiments to improve three different prostheses. 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. 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 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. Kr: Apart from Upanishad on death, even a psychologist who advocates, may also feel about it as an atheist. K Rajaram IRS 9525 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZorkF-_M-Cxte7i_uRHrXtC_TVuo0f4Xb6Rwqvy86OErmg%40mail.gmail.com.
