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We come now to the rather sad last years of Freud's life: the last twelve years from the writing of ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety’ until his death. For despite being ill he seems to have worked a lot: in between a dozen operations he wrote three volumes of papers. His interest certainly turned very strongly toward retrospection on the implications of psycho-analytic findings for other fields - anthropology, sociology, and politics; and he produced these works: ‘The Future of an Illusion’, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, and ‘Moses and Monotheism’, which I personally do not find very interesting. There is a change in his style of writing: it becomes very prolix and diffuse in many places; I think writing had probably become a necessary part of his life, and of course the people who followed him were interested in anything written by him.
However, I do not wish to discuss these works; rather, I propose to study the winding-up and tying together of his clinical ideas and the tools and equipment of psycho-analysis - developments in his attitudes rather than his technique: such as the problem of female sexuality; a more definitive view of the perversions; and a clearer shape to the concept of splitting of the ego and the mechanisms of psycho-pathology. All this makes a substantial though not perhaps a major contribution, such as occurred throughout the marvellous six years from 1930 to 1926, in which the whole theory was revised to become the Structural Theory, and with it the model of the mind for use in the consulting room. ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety’, or ‘The Problem of Anxiety’ as it is sometimes called, really reversed Freud's previous stand concerning anxiety. He tended earlier to consider it to be a kind of noise made in the mind as a result of the stagnation of sexual impulses and their transformation into mental pain. But here he decides that anxiety is really at the heart of the matter, and he uses the term not simply as a descriptive one (as previo