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As Freud's personal physician from 1928 until his death, Max Schur had an intimate relationship that he was loathe to put into print. But Freud, for the sake of science and with a courageous heart, had discussed his own patients, and this gave Schur a worthy precedent.
The picture of Freud facing death from an ever-encroaching cancer and of Schur as minister to the disease gives this book its substance and worth. It is a portrait of Freud's courage and resoluteness which have now been described many times, and also of the utter integrity and devotion of Schur. Schur's description of Freud's illness and of their relationship is presented with truth and dignity. We could not ask for more.
We learn much less of the reaction of Freud's family to his illness, except for the total devotion of Anna Freud, which has already been amply documented. Martha Freud is glaringly conspicuous by her absence, and in fact her name hardly appears in the book.
The author states in his Introduction, and in italics, that his book is “not a full-scale biography” (p. 16). It is rather a study of Freud's attitudes toward and defenses against the idea of death. The study of Freud's feelings about death, including, of course, his famous death-wish theory, is of much interest, but Schur's approach is the shopworn exegetical one. He quotes lengthy texts from Freud's letters to Fliess* and to others, and he analyzes these passages as if they were sessions of psychoanalytic therapy (p. 47). Freud's scientific publications are treated in a similar vein. Only those readers who are comfortable with the teasing out of verbal minutiae will profit from this aspect of the volume, which Schur himself regarded as the major thrust of his writing. To others, this immersion in gloss may well appear as a picking at bones.
Schur was aware that the criticism of his being exegetical would be leveled (p. 15), but he preferred to deal with Freud's death anxieties