256

Sigmund Freud

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:15,000.00 - 20,000.00 USD
Sigmund Freud

Bidding Over

The auction is over for this lot.
The auctioneer wasn't accepting online bids for this lot.

Contact the auctioneer for information on the auction results.

Search for other lots to bid on...
Auction Date:2014 Sep 10 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:236 Commercial St., Suite 100, Boston, Massachusetts, 02109, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
ALS in German, signed “Freud,” one page, lightly-lined, 5.25 x 8.5, October 14, 1926. Letter to a woman apparently suffering from cancer. In part (translated): “Please do not interpret my long silence as a lack of empathy on my part! I can absolutely identify with everything such an event engenders, I just find it very difficult to put my feelings into words, particularly as one who is no longer enjoying life in its fullness, and as one who certainly doesn’t count himself entirely among the living…You perhaps are unable to fathom the degree to which this condition changes a person’s general outlook in regard to everything in this world. I am not trying to console you, and do not wish to disturb your legitimate grief, I only offer my heartfelt regards as your kin.” On the reverse is the last page of a letter written by his wife, signed “Martha Freud,” in part (translated): “I would love to learn, dear Hanna, how you are doing now…in our hearts we are close and enjoy our deep friendship despite the great distance between us.” In fine condition, with central vertical and horizontal folds and a few smalls stains.

By this point Freud himself had been battling cancer of the jaw for three years, which seriously affected his outlook on life, as he describes in this letter. Following his first surgery, his doctor realized that further surgery would be required in the future—he refrained from telling Freud, however, fearing that he might commit suicide. Freud had written extensively on death in his work, establishing the idea of the ‘death drive’ in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He built upon the idea in 1923’s The Ego and the Id, which discussed the tensions between the two classes of instincts, the ‘death-instinct’ and ‘love-instinct,’ and developed it even further in Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930. A remarkable letter in which Freud frankly confronts his own mortality, lending great insight into his thoughts during this period.