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.
Sigmund Freud was tormented throughout his life by death-related associations. Ernest Jones (1957), describing Freud's “repeated attacks of what he called Todesangst (dread of death),” cites an instance when his adult subject asserted that thoughts of death visited him “every day of his life” (279). Smiley Blanton (1971), in Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud, quotes Freud during their March 6, 1930, session: “I think about the possibility of death every day. It is good practice” (48).
At the age of two, Sigmund was probably exposed to an array of visualizations not unlike those replicated in the oeuvre of Käthe Kollwitz (see figure 1).1 In a salient context, according to Kollwitz's autobiographical memoir, the imprint of her baby brother's death and their mother's reaction to it so pervaded her life2 that it might explain her initial preoccupation with the mother-child-death theme (1922, 19-20). Almost palpable in several of her compositions is the effect of parental mourning upon the surviving sibling (Pollock 1989, 549-73).
As a result of his self-analysis, Freud presumably came to apprehend the traumatic stimuli that he had repressed. Several authors have familarized us with the intrapsychic toll such traumas exacted throughout the succeeding (and more documentable) decades of Sigmund's life by reason of his reconstruction of certain dreams and childhood nightmares. For instance, in Sigmund Freud's Dreams, Alexander Grinstein (1980)