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Death came suddenly to Doctor Hitschmann on July 31st, 1957, only a few days after his eighty-sixth birthday. On the morning of the day he died, he said smilingly: 'Today I feel as well as I did twenty-five years ago—as if I were sixty'.
In anticipation of Freud's sixtieth birthday in 1916, Hitschmann wrote a tribute intended to be read on that occasion. It was not read but sent as a letter to Freud. Freud in his answer commented: 'Usually only a eulogy at the cemetery is as beautiful and kind as your undelivered speech'. 'No doubt', Hitschmann wrote in his last book, Great Men, which he thought of as his own epilogue, '… unconscious identification with the master gave me the impulse to write interpretative analytical papers as he had done'. Freud had encouraged him more than forty years before to do so: 'Continue with me in your scientific pursuits and in your friendship and interest in our mutual destinies'. And that Edward Hitschmann did to the last day of his life.
Ernest Jones wrote him four years ago: 'You have been practicing psychoanalysis fourteen years longer than Freud, and of course longer than anyone else'.
It was in 1905 that Paul Federn introduced Hitschmann to Freud. From then on Hitschmann was an ardent protagonist of psychoanalysis, one of its most assiduous workers, one of the earliest exponents of Freud's work, and a man whose intellect and culture earned him a singular, prominent place in our ranks. It will always remain his incontestable merit to have initiated the science of psychoanalytic biography. He did it so well because he was a 'bookish man', as he called himself. He was the first librarian of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and its vice-president under Freud's chairmanship. He was also one of the forty-two people who attended the first meeting for 'Freudian Psychology' in Salzburg in 1908.