My Grandfather and Sigmund Freud: An Intervention

Abstract

Sixty years ago my grandfather, a professor of medicine, made a house call on Sigmund Freud. Freud's cancer was quite advanced. At the same time Austria was deeply infected by the “social cancer” of Nazi anti-Semitism and the Freud family was extremely vulnerable to its demonic threat. Prudently, my grandfather took this opportunity to urge the reluctant Freud to leave Europe before Hitler annexed Austria. The other principle figures related to this intervention were Anna Freud and Max Schur, Freud's personal physician. During this consultation my grandfather also discovered that Freud's cherished collection of antiquities was a symbol of his metaphorical association of archaeology and psychoanalysis.