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In a letter to max eitingon, Freud (1960) wrote that the decade between fifty and sixty was “the most beautiful and the richest in content” (p. 392) and was still to come for Eitingon. The occasion for this letter was the death of Eitingon's mother. Eitingon was then forty-nine years old and Freud seventy-three; his own mother, ailing because of old age, would die within half a year. The reason that the remark about the sixth decade found its way into a condolence letter to his friend and pupil can be reconstructed. In the same letter, preceding the comment in question, Freud confessed that his still-living mother “bars my way to the longed-for rest, to the eternal nothingness” (pp. 391-392). This statement demanded forceful proof that it had no validity for Eitingon, whose mother's death would otherwise similarly have opened the way to eternal nothingness for him. Therefore, Freud's praise of the sixth decade may have been more forceful than it would have been in different circumstances.
For Freud the sixth decade had been indeed blessed. It started