Funeral Oration

As a close friend of Prof. Freud and his family for more than 30 years it is my privilege to voice our last respects to him. I speak for his family and his friends gathered here, and I also think of friends far away, of Brill, Eitingon, Federn, Sachs and others and of the shades of Abraham and Ferenczi. Our first thoughts must surely be for the dead man himself. Those who know the horrors of suffering he has passed through, sufferings which reached an unspeakable intensity in the last few months, must be possessed with a sense of relief for his sake. He will suffer no more. It was hard to wish that he would live a day longer when his life was reduced to a pin-point of personal agony. Nor did he in any way dread death. And that although what in others expresses itself as religious feeling did so in him as a transcendent belief in the value of life, and in the value of love. Thus one can say of him that as never man loved life more, so never man feared death less. He had lived a full life, had experienced and felt its heights as well as its depths; he had warmed both hands at the fire of life, and life had nothing left to offer. He died surrounded by every loving care, in a land that had shown him more courtesy, more esteem and more honour than his own or any other had, a land which I think he himself esteemed beyond all others. He is being buried to-day in the atmosphere he would have wished, one of stark truth and realism; in sheer simplicity, without a note of pomp or ceremony.

He has lost nothing through death, so we cannot truly mourn for his sake. But what of ourselves? A world without Freud! A world without that vivid personality, without that entrancing and benign smile; without those wise and trenchant comments on the great and small things of life, that “Grosszügigkeit” in instant readiness to help. It is not long since he wrote