Sigmund Freud - Death

Death

By mid-September 1939, Freud's cancer of the oral cavity was causing him increasingly severe pain and had been declared to be inoperable. After reading Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting, Freud turned to his doctor, friend and fellow refugee, Max Schur, reminding him that they had previously discussed the terminal stages of his illness: "Schur, you remember our 'contract' not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense." When Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, "I thank you," and then "Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it." Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father’s death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive, and on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's death on 23 September 1939.

Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium in North London. Ernest Jones gave the funeral oration to a gathering of friends, psychoanalysts and Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. Freud's ashes were later placed in the crematorium's columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn that Freud had received as a gift from Princess Bonaparte and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After his wife Martha died in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.