Freud and Augustus: two men who arranged their own exits

Sigmund Freud died at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, in the early hours of 23 September 1939, three weeks into the war and fifteen months after he had left Vienna. He was eighty-three. He had lived for sixteen years with a cancer of the jaw and palate that Hans Pichler had operated on more than thirty times, and with a prosthesis he called "the monster" that had to be taken out and refitted daily and made eating and speech an ordeal. In his last weeks the wound in his cheek had become necrotic. The smell was such that his chow, Lün, would not come near him and crouched in the far corner of the room. He kept reading, Balzac's La Peau de chagrin last of all, and sat out under mosquito netting in the garden to look at the flowers.

On 21 September he took his physician's hand. The account is Max Schur's, and it has been quoted for fifty years: "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it's nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur said he had not forgotten. Freud thanked him, and asked him to tell Anna.

Nineteen hundred and one years earlier, on 23 September 63 BC, Gaius Octavius was born in Rome. He became Caesar's heir at eighteen, master of the Mediterranean world after Actium at thirty-one, and, in 27 BC, Augustus. He died at Nola on 19 August AD 14, and Suetonius tells us that on the last day he called for a mirror, had his hair combed and his slack jaw set straight, and asked the friends admitted to the room whether he had played his part in the comedy of life well enough. Then he gave them the tag with which actors closed a Greek mime: if the play has pleased you, clap your hands and send us off with applause. Suetonius adds that he had been granted the easy end he had always prayed for, and the word he uses for it is euthanasia.

Neither man is on this page by accident of date alone. Each was the author of his own ending, and each, more to the point, was the author of the account of it: Freud through the contract with Schur, which turned his death into a documented case; Augustus through the Res Gestae, which he left to be cut in bronze outside his tomb so that the last word on his reign would be his. What the historians and biographers have done with those accounts since is the subject of this entry, and it is not a tidy one.

What Schur said, what Gay said, and what the archive says#

Schur had become Freud's doctor in 1928, on the recommendation of Marie Bonaparte, replacing Felix Deutsch, who had been dismissed for concealing the original diagnosis. At their first meeting Freud extracted two promises: that Schur would always tell him the truth, and that when the time came he would not let him be tormented unnecessarily. Schur's own book, Freud: Living and Dying, published posthumously in 1972, gives the ending in three sentences. "When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. I repeated this dose after about twelve hours. He lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again." Freud died, in Schur's account, at three in the morning on 23 September, which fell that year on the first day of Yom Kippur. His body was cremated at Golders Green on 26 September; Ernest Jones spoke in English and Stefan Zweig in German, and the ashes were placed in a Greek bell krater painted with Dionysian scenes that Bonaparte had given him years before and that had stood in his study.

That is the canonical version, and it is not quite stable. Peter Gay's 1988 biography, working from Schur's papers, gives the first dose as three centigrams, notes that two was the normal sedative dose, and has Schur repeat the injection when Freud grew restless and give a final one on 22 September. Roy Lacoursière, in American Imago in 2008, went back through the correspondence and found the discrepancies larger than that. His conclusion, since incorporated into the Freud Museum's own account, is that Schur was not present for the last injection at all; that it was given by Josefine Stross, the paediatrician and colleague of Anna Freud who was in the house; and that Freud died late on the night of 23 September rather than at three in the morning. The Museum's current article says, flatly, that he died shortly before midnight. Nothing in this changes the ethics. Freud asked to die, Anna, who at first wanted to wait, consented, and a doctor obliged. What it changes is the status of Schur's narrative, which had the shape of a testament and turns out to have been a reconstruction, written decades later by a man who had reasons to place himself at the bedside. Biographers who repeat it as fact are doing what Freud spent his life telling them not to do.

The bioethics literature has adopted the case as a founding instance of physician-assisted death, and it is used on both sides. The consent was unambiguous, the suffering extreme, the physician a friend of eleven years' standing. On the other hand the doses were, by every account, meant to end a life, not to relieve pain with death as a foreseen side effect, so the doctrine of double effect gives no cover; and the patient's own daughter had to be brought round. Those who think the case settles the argument have not read it closely.

Rome in Freud's head#

Freud had a Rome problem long before he had a Roman death. In the 1890s he could not bring himself to enter the city, breaking off his Italian journeys short of it for years, a symptom he analysed at length in The Interpretation of Dreams by way of Hannibal, who also never reached it. When he finally went, in 1901, he went back again and again. And in 1930, in the opening chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents, he used the city as an image of the mind. Suppose, he wrote, that Rome were not a human habitation but a psychical entity in which nothing that had once come into existence had passed away: then "the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine", and where the Colosseum stands one could admire Nero's vanished Golden House at the same time. He then concedes that the image fails, because two things cannot occupy one space; but the principle it was meant to illustrate stands, that in mental life "it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved". The palaces of the Caesars begin with the house of Augustus on the Palatine. The man born on this day is, in the most literal sense, part of the furniture of Freud's picture of the unconscious.

The reader who wants the modern application of that picture, the argument that social media is a collective unconscious with the amplifier turned up, can find it here; Lacan's return to Freud is in the entry for 9 September.

Augustus, the alphabet and the art of not seeming to rule#

The case for putting a Roman emperor into a philosophy calendar has to be made, and it has two parts. The first is that Augustus was taught by philosophers and, on the ancient evidence, listened. As a teenager at Apollonia he studied under Athenodorus of Tarsus, a Stoic and pupil of Posidonius, and under Areius of Alexandria, whose summary of Stoic ethics survives in Stobaeus. Plutarch preserves the counsel Athenodorus gave when he asked leave to retire: whenever you feel anger coming, Caesar, say nothing and do nothing until you have recited the twenty-four letters of the alphabet. Augustus is said to have taken his hand and kept him another year. Seneca, in De ira, cites Augustus as a ruler who had learned not to act in anger, and his Consolation to Marcia records that Areius was the one who talked Livia through the death of her son Drusus. The technique is a delay between impulse and act, imposed by the self on the self, which is as short a description of what Freud later called the reality principle as any in the literature. That is a coincidence of content, not of influence, and it should be stated as no more than that.

The second part of the case is the Res Gestae, and here Augustus earns his paragraph as a political philosopher in spite of himself. Chapter 34 describes what he did in 27 BC: "I transferred the state from my own power into the control of the senate and Roman people." And then the sentence that every theory of soft power has been footnoting since: "I surpassed all in influence, yet held no greater power than my colleagues in office." Auctoritas against potestas. The claim is that the constitution was restored, the magistracies filled, the elections held, and that he was merely first among citizens by the weight of his standing. Tacitus, writing a century later at the start of the Annals, accepted the description of the mechanism and rejected the innocence: Augustus "first conciliated the army by gratuities, the populace by cheapened corn, the world by the amenities of peace, then step by step began to make his ascent and to unite in his own person the functions of the senate, the magistracy, and the legislature". At home all was calm, Tacitus goes on; "the officials carried the old names"; and few were left who had seen the Republic.

That last phrase, eadem magistratuum vocabula, the same names for the magistrates, has become a standard citation in the literature on what political scientists now call competitive authoritarianism, regimes in which the institutions persist and the elections are held and the outcome is nonetheless not in doubt. A looser paraphrase is often put in Tacitus's mouth, to the effect that in Rome everything kept its appearance and nothing its substance; the Latin does not say that, and the difference matters, since Tacitus's point is subtler. The names were not a mask over the real thing. They were the real thing, hollowed out from inside while continuing to function. Readers who want the modern vocabulary can consult our review of the political books of the authoritarian turn and the piece on where democratic norms give way. Cicero, who had a view on all of this and was killed for it before Octavian turned thirty, is here.

The connection to Freud is the one the day supplies. Both men were preoccupied with the gap between an official account and what lay beneath it, and both wrote the official account of themselves. Augustus's is the more successful, because the bronze at the Mausoleum was lost and the copy at Ancyra survived, and because for two thousand years the phrase "restored the Republic" has done its work on readers who know perfectly well it is false. Freud's, the "contract" with Schur and Schur's memoir of it, held for seventy years before an archivist took it apart. Neither man would have been surprised by the other's fate. Freud's teaching was that the story a person tells about himself is evidence, and never the verdict. Augustus's practice was that the story, told well enough and cut in metal, becomes the verdict for as long as anyone is counting.

Also on the day#

This afternoon in New York, under the French presidency and with Jean-Noël Barrot in the chair, the United Nations Security Council holds a high-level briefing on artificial intelligence and international security. The briefers listed by Security Council Report are Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Clément Delangue. France's concept note frames the session around the systemic risks of "misalignment and loss of control over the most capable AI models", which is a phrase Augustus would have understood, since it describes the one problem he solved for himself and nobody has solved since: how an authority is bound. Our reporting on the philosophers' case for an AI treaty on the nuclear model and on Amodei's argument about who can bind a frontier lab is the background. The Philosophicum Lech continues in the Vorarlberg through Sunday. The most recent entry in this series to reach the archive, on Freire, Gilson and Vattimo, is here.