Max Schur—1897-1969

AS a student Max Schur was an auditor at Freud's original introductory lectures. Despite later specialization in internal medicine, he retained a keen interest in psychoanalysis. On the recommendation of Princess Marie Bonaparte, one of his patients, he had the opportunity to become Freud's own physician in 1928. Thereafter a close bond existed between the two men which was only partly dissolved by Freud's death in 1939. After Schur came to the United States, he devoted himself increasingly and at last completely to psychoanalysis.

Although his analytic career began late, it grew in productivity and distinction with each passing year. Medical and analytic experience combined as Schur pursued his prime interest, body-mind relationships, in a series of studies that introduced clarifications and new outlooks in such areas as somatization reactions, affects (especially anxiety), ethology, child development, and ultimately in the most challenging, the id. His concept of the continuum between somatic and psychic functions proved an especially effective instrument as devised by this great physician-analyst.

Schur also used three Freud Lectures to add detail to the portrait of Freud himself as derived from personal impressions and access to unpublished documents. He was able to speak with unique authority on Freud's personal and scientific attitudes toward death. At the end, Schur was working with Ernst Freud on an unabridged edition of the Fliess correspondence.

His penetrating intelligence and benevolent ardor were constantly in evidence at panels and meetings, in promoting research, in the activities of the Freud Archives, as professor at 'Downstate', New York, and as an editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association as well as of volumes to honor Heinz Hartmann and Princess Bonaparte. While he was President of The Psychoanalytic Association of New York, his seventieth birthday brought forward plans to present him with a Festschrift. Although he