A Note on Freud's Last Note
Of the last things Freud wrote were fragments and notes written in London over the summer of 1938; he had just narrowly escaped the Anschluss; Europe was on the verge of war; he was slowly dying of cancer. The notes were hand written on a single sheet of paper, later found on his Maresfield Gardens desk and published posthumously in volume XXIII of the Standard Edition under the title Findings, Ideas, Problems (1938). The last entry of this text reads as follows: “August 22- Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.”
This has always struck me as a private vindication of mysticism in his last days. Ever watchful of occultism, spiritualisms and religious superstitions, Freud had meticulously developed the public persona of the destroyer of illusions and yet privately he was rather more circumspect and open to the topic, becoming yet even more sympathetic in old age. Ernest Jones’s biography notes regret late in life that Freud had not examined more closely the “rarer and more profound type of religious emotion as experienced by mystics and saints.”
May we not then read this note as a kind of rehabilitation of the mystic in his thought? It is the weird nature of last words that they may revise retroactively all of the preceding work. One might read this note and begin again at the beginning of the standard edition with this “obscure self-perception” in mind. What would such an ordinary mysticism look like if not like psychoanalysis itself?
Freud’s London desk, 1938
