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Sigmund Freud

  • Helped found the Tavistock Institute.
  • Masturbation.
  • Vagina Dentata.
  • Cocaine user.
  • Nazi sympathizer (is this true?) (didn't the Nazis denounce Freud and psychoanalysis?) "My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time I prefer to call myself a Jew."
  • Freud's books were burned in Germany by 1933. Said Freud: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
  • The writing on the wall became more apparent when his daughter, Anna Freud, was interrogated for a full day by the Gestapo. Before Sigmund was allowed to emigrate, he signed a document that stated he had not been mistreated. His postscript, appended to the document, read "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."
  • Freud left Austria after the Anschluss, to avoid the Nazis, to Paris; and then departed Paris for England. This was accomplished with the assistance of Marie Bonaparte (of the Napoleon Bonapartes). While the Bonaparte Papers are in the custody of the Library of Congress, access has never been granted to their scholarship, at the insistence of the Bonaparte heirs, until 2020.
  • His four sisters, who stayed in Vienna, were murdered in concentration camps.
  • Committed suicide in 1939, after a long bout with maxillary cancer.
  • He was cremated, ashes at Golders Green Crematorium in Golders Green.
  • Anna died in 1982.
  • Freud's granddaughter Sophie (a doctor in her own right), on Freudian theory: "I think it's such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it."


timeline

23 Sep 1939 Sigmund Freud commits suicide with the help of his personal physician, Max Schur. The good doctor obligingly administered 21mg of morphine—a lethal dose.


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