Who Was Sigmund Freud Pt7
Later Years
The final 20 years of Freud’s life were blighted by many difficult experiences. His second daughter, Sophie, died in 1920, aged only 26, to be followed by her son (Freud’s favourite grandson) three years later. This period also saw the first of 33 operations on a cancerous jaw and palate. In 1933, furthermore, Freud’s books were publicly burned by the Nazis in Berlin and the practice of psychoanalysis was banned. Such events may well have reinforced the revision of his theories to include the death instinct.
This last phase of Freud’s life represented a courageous struggle against misfortune and suffering. Significant modifications and additions to his ideas were presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), containing the first account of the death instinct; The Ego and the Id (1923), reformulating Freud’s views on the structure of the mind; and Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), detailing ramifications of the main derivative of the death instinct, aggression. In addition, Freud became the fourth recipient of the prestigious (literary) Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt (1930), collaborated with Albert Einstein in 1933 over the publication Why War?, and in 1936 was elected as Corresponding Member of the Royal Society. Following the annexation of Austria, Freud spent the final year of his life in London, where he died on 23rd September 1939, aged 83.
