Facts from the Captivating Life of Sigmund Freud

Freud with other pioneers of psychoanalysis at Clark University, Massachusetts, in 1909. Wikimedia

25. Freud’s death was an illegal assisted suicide in September, 1939

Max Schur euthanized his friend and patient Sigmund Freud, using three large doses of morphine, on September 23, 1939, according to some sources. Others disagree. Based on the recollections of Anna Freud, another physician, Josephine Stross, administered the third and fatal dose. The arrangement allowed both physicians to cover their tracks, so to speak, at a time when physician-assisted suicide was considered first-degree murder. Freud was cremated at Golders Greers and his ashes retained at the crematorium. His wife Martha died in 1951, and her ashes joined with her husband’s.

Freud’s famous observation that “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, or variations of it, most likely came from another source. It didn’t appear in writing until 1950 and in any case, it is at complete odds with the core of Freud’s thinking. To him, the human psyche was a place of constant tension between the need for pleasure and the need for death, and every thought, every act, every dream, was a reflection of the tension. Most of his work is held outside mainstream science today, though some still support and follow it, and he has been for decades the stereotypical parody of the psychiatrist analyzing a patient, usually with a cigar in hand.