You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the fall of 1915 Max Schur, 18 years old and a medical student at the University of Vienna, attended Freud's Introductory Lectures at the University. He became enthralled by psychoanalysis, but nevertheless decided
to specialize in internal medicine. In 1924 he started his personal analysis, and four years later when Schur was 32, Freud asked him to be his physician. Their relationship lasted until Freud's death in 1939.
Schur is particularly well qualified to write about Freud, not only because he had access to Freud's unpublished letters to Fliess and other unknown material, but also because he and Freud had the same cultural, educational, and ethnic backgrounds. He is therefore as much at home with Freud's literary allusions as he is with Freud's very original use of the Viennese dialect and Jewish expressions. This is quite important because Freud created new words in an idiosyncratic way, and Schur serves as an excellent guide.
It is not surprising that Schur had to face considerable difficulties within himself when he set out to write this book. He had serious questions about violating the privacy of the physician-patient relationship. "I would have to approach the topic in a manner which would have been acceptable to Freud himself" (p. 3). Schur emphasizes that his book is "not a full-scale biography." Although this is undoubtedly true, he does provide, as no other biographer has done before, the full sweep of Freud's development from an insecure, poverty-stricken student to a man with self-confidence and serenity. One of his aims is to study "the gradual development of different responses used by Freud to prevent situations of great stress and danger from becoming traumatic and to discover the ways which Freud utilized to achieve mastery without resorting to denial" (p. 40). He describes how Freud achieved "that inimitable combination of serenity, conviction, strength, pride, and humility which is unforgettable to anyone who has known him" (p.