Fifty years ago, on September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died at the age of eighty-three at the Maresfield Gardens home of his son Ernest. Only seven weeks before, writes Peter Gay in his Freud: A Life for our Time, “in a decisive gesture of farewell to life, Freud officially closed his medical practice.” Two weeks before his death Germany invaded Poland and two days later Britain and France declared war on the Reich.
“My real reaction was sadness and especially personal sadness: because I had tried to see him and that was a lost opportunity. Now that was lost in a final way and I was doubly sad and rejected,” Dr. George Gero told Arlene Heyman. Her interviews with Helen Schur, Richard Sterba and Leo Stone appear on pages 2-5. These reflections express not only their experience of personal loss but the sense of anxious foreboding that gripped the entire profession and indeed all of Europe.
William Jeffrey's article, “After the Anschluss: the Rescue of the Analysts,” (p. 6) documents the activities of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration. Formed under the chairmanship of Lawrence Kubie following the Anschluss and later co-chaired by Bettina Warburg, the committee tracked the activities of European analysts for the next six years, providing the visas, affidavits and money that helped fifty-three analysts (and ninety-eight others) escape the Nazis.
We have tried, in this issue of the American Psychoanalyst, to illuminate the historical moment of Freud's death. That death followed the virtual expatriation of analysis from Germany and Austria, an early victim of Hitler's ascendency. Shortly it would be uprooted from the rest of the continent. But even before Freud's death, and certainly by 1938, the year of Hitler's annexation of Austria, the movement's center of gravity had shifted from Vienna to London. Over the next few years many would cross the Atlantic to the United States. The heroic effort, mounted by a small number of American analysts who, under the auspices of the American Psychoanalytic Association, formed the committee to aid European analysts in emigrating to the United States, is an uplifting aspect of this tragic interlude in psychoanalytic history. The members of the committee were intent on seeing that their European colleagues did not suffer the same fate as had analysis itself.
Freud's death in 1939 bisects the history of psychoanalysis into an half century during which its founder personally dominates the field and an ensuing half century of growth and development under his successors, including, prominently, many of the analysts who escaped from Europe and came to the United States. The fiftieth anniversary of this event is being marked by symposia on several continents. On September 16 the American Psychoanalytic Association affiliate societies of Greater New York, Philadelphia and Western New England, in conjunction with the New School for Social Research and The Sigmund Freud Archives, hosted a day-long symposium entitled “The Living Legacy of Sigmund Freud.” On September 23 an exhibit of Freud's collection of antiquities permanently housed in the Freud museum opened in Philadelphia accompanied by a symposium, “Through the Looking Glass: Freud's Impact on Contemporary Culture,” at the Institute of the Philadelphia Hospital. Between November 3 and 5 there was a symposium at the University of South Carolina. “Freud: Impact on 20th Century Thought.”
These meetings are occasions for us to reflect anew on our Freudian heritage and its elaboration, extension and recasting over the past fifty years. Reflecting on the tragic historic sequelae to Freud's death in 1939 is also important Just as psychoanalysis as a treatment is predicated on the growth promoting impact of coming to grips with one's personal history, so psychoanalysis as a profession has much to gain from the collective working through of its political and institutional history. We commemorate Freud's death in a manner true to his spirit by placing the event in historical context, pondering the horrible near death of European civilization of which Freud's actual death was just a poignant omen.