Sigmund Freud: The Man and his Work

Sigmund Freud died at midnight on September 23, 1939. This date and the date May 6, 1856, are landmarks in the history of mankind, for within this span of eighty-three years there lived a man whose life was his work and whose work was nothing less than the discovery of man in men.

Three years ago on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday, I ventured the opinion that Freud will one day be recognized as a liberator of mankind. All who are familiar with his life and work feel the spirit of immortality that surrounds the figure of Freud. Mankind needs and will need Freud's work for hundreds of years to come in order eventually to be liberated from the only fundamental obstacle to its progress: from bondage to the human unconscious. The power that the unconscious exerts upon man is irrational, regressive. Freud fearlessly penetrated this dangerous, uncanny realm of the mind, a region that heretofore only mysticism had attempted to approach. He made of psychology a natural science through which he uncovered the unconscious sources and vicissitudes of our instincts, the driving emotional forces of human nature. He gave man the means of acquiring knowledge of himself and thereby of understanding his fellow men. This knowledge will enable man to master the elementary instinctual forces of human nature and to direct his energies towards a constructive end and so make life livable for all. On his long road of development from animalism to his present state of civilization with its highly developed sciences and techniques, man has never achieved this mastery; for the most important features of this civilization have been acquired by man's repressing his antagonistic