Sigmund Freud and Suicide—In His Life and in His Writings

Freud met with a number of deaths in his family; his brother Julius died at 8 months old when Freud himself was 19 months old. Freud had been jealous of and hostile to Julius, and his death brought about lasting guilty feelings in Sigmund (Jones, 1961, p. 7). Ignaz Schönberg, engaged to Minna Bernays, the sister of Freud's fiancé Martha Bernays, died from tuberculosis in 1886. Freud's colleagues in the physiological laboratory of Brücke, Joseph Paneth and Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, died quite young, in 1890 and 1891, respectively. Both were involved in one of Freud's most famous dreams, the “non vixit” dream from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Von Fleischl-Marxow, working on an autopsy in the pathology laboratory in 1871, had to have an infected finger amputated. A neuroma developed, giving him terrible pain. Gradually, his condition became life-threatening. To suppress the pain, von Fleischl-Marxow became addicted to morphine. At this time, Freud was in his so-called “cocaine period” (Cohen, 2011; Markel, 2011). One possible use of cocaine was to cure morphine dependency, and Freud offered his colleague cocaine, which made him addicted to both substances. Von Fleischl-Marxow's state was desperate, and he told Freud that he planned to commit suicide when his parents died (Ferris, 1997, p. 56).

The death with strongest impact on Freud, however, was that of his father in 1896. This formed the starting point of his self-analysis and, by implication, also psychoanalysis. Freud wrote that his father's death had “reawakened all my early feelings. Now I feel quite uprooted” (Jones, 1961, p. 213).

These deaths were not suicides, but Freud also, quite early in life, experienced two suicides. One was the young neurologist Nathan Weiss (1851-1883), who hanged himself ten days after returning from his honeymoon. Weiss's death opened a career possibility for Freud at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus in Vienna. From the letters Freud