To Die One’s Own Death – Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic, Livestreamed from London Freud Museum, 23 September 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT It has been a hundred years since the tragic loss of Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, to the Spanish flu shortly after the end of World War One. In this essay, delivered as the 47th Annual Vienna Freud Museum lecture, Jacqueline Rose argues that Freud’s historic moment – of grief, pandemic and war – had an even more decisive impact on his thinking than has previously been recognised. Freud’s writings on the death drive collide with, and are fuelled by, an increasingly urgent engagement with our innermost psychic and biological relationship to the past and, at the same time, with the cruelty and injustice of the world. Today, as we confront the darkness of the hour, psychoanalysis has never been more urgently needed. What can we still learn from Freud about how to live and how to die in our own troubled times?