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In Dr Schur's first meeting with Freud in 1928, he promised that when his time came he would not let him suffer unnecessarily. Freud had already had cancer of the jaw and palate for five years and was to live for another eleven.
Unlike Ernest Jones, Schur has not separated Freud's life and works as Jones did, but has woven them in together. This is an advantage. He has carefully and lovingly compiled a mass of data from his own observations and those of others on his patient's attitude to life and death, death being a prospect which haunted him at least since the age of forty. Data from earlier times are extracted from letters to Fliess, a previous friend and medical adviser, and from other correspondence with intimates, some never yet published.
He gives us a picture of the joys and sufferings of an exceptional human being in the throes of creation, certainly idealized but nonetheless moving, though being a psychoanalyst himself, it is strange that he does not comment directly on the destructive aspect of creation which in Freud's case appeared in somatic disturbances with associated presentiments of death. That it also occurred in his relationships is even denied.
The letters to Fliess give a horrifying impression of a relationship in which Freud's need of a confidante for his ideas and also for a psychotherapist blinded him to the way he was being used as an experimental animal for Fliess's theories, first of the importance of nasal pathology as the root of all evil, and then of his periodicity theory which he thought accounted for crisis periods in the life of men and women. In this theory, Fliess recognized the man in the woman and the woman in the man but made no further use of it. Freud appears as a passive and even enthusiastic victim of numerous surgical interventions as a ‘lesser evil’ to his fear of heart failure of which he had all the symptoms. On the other hand, the periodicity theory played into an already established crisis date phobia associated with f