1939 Sigmund Freud died in exile in Hampstead, England, where he had lived after fleeing Vienna the previous year. War had been declared on his persecutor, Nazi Germany, a fortnight earlier. Freud did not wait to see the outcome. He doubtless feared the worst. Suffering from terminal cancer (brought on by his habitual cigar), he prevailed on a doctor friend, Max Schur, to overdose him with morphine. ‘It is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more’, he stoically explained.
There were many obituaries, none finer than that from W.H. Auden, in his poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’. Over the 28 verses Auden does not over-praise Freud, but shrewdly sees him as less a psychotherapist than a prophet who has changed humanity’s vision of itself for, at least, a generation:
for one who’d lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion.
Auden had been introduced to Freud early in life by his doctor father. At university, he spread the Freudian gospel to acolytes such as Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood – the poet, he insisted, must be ‘clinical’. In 2001 a collection of unpublished (and later deemed unpublishable by the poet) ‘case poems’ came to light. They were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Auden on Freudian themes.
It was in his visits to his friends Isherwood and Spender in Weimar Berlin that Auden came into closest contact with Freudianism, via the teachings of Homer Lane, to whom he was introduced by John Layard. Auden was a convert – although a sceptical one. After Layard’s bungled suicide attempt, Auden referred to him as ‘loony Layard’ (Freud gets away with a mere ‘absurd’). Less benevolent than Max Schur, when Layard – who had shot himself in the mouth – asked Wystan to ‘finish him off’, Auden refused, saying: ‘I’m terribly sorry, I know you want this, but I can’t do it, because I might be hanged if I did.’
Ten years later, when he wrote his elegy for Freud, Auden was himself a refugee. He and Isherwood had sailed for the USA, fearing the outbreak of war in Europe, in January 1939. He died in 1973, after a peripatetic life, in Freud’s Vienna, alone in a hotel room.