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cancer.
    In June of 1923, as his four-year-old grandson, Heinz, lay in a coma, Freud had already begun to speak of him in the past tense: “He was indeed an enchanting fellow,” and “I have hardly ever loved another human being, certainly not a child, so much as him.” 7 Heinz was frail and skinny, nothing but bones and hair and eyes. 8 There was no hope of survival, and yet he would occasionally open his eyes and act and talk just like his old, charming, enchanting, clever self, making it hard to believe that he was really dying. Freud said, “I find this loss very hard to bear. I don’t think I have ever experienced such grief.” 9
    Three years later, in a letter of condolence to Ludwig Binswanger, a colleague who had recently lost his eight-year-old son to tubercular meningitis, Freud does not immediately tell him about the death of his grandson from the same illness. Instead he begins by recounting his reaction to the death of his twenty-seven-year old daughter, Sophie. “That was 1920, when we were crushed and miserable, after years of war, against which we had steeled our- selves against hearing that we had lost a son or even three sons. Thus, we had been resigned to fate in advance.” 10 Freud was trying to explain to Binswager (and to himself, I imagine) that Sophie’s death had not affected him so pro- foundly as the death of her child, his little grandson, Heinz, or as Freud called him, Heinerle.
    It was not Freud’s resignation to fate, however, that had made the death of Sophie bearable. In telling Binswanger about Heinz, Freud said, “To me this child had taken the place of all my children and other grandchildren.” 11 The presence of Heinz had consoled Freud and helped him to recover from the death of his favorite daughter, Sophie. As so often happens when a parent dies, a part of her or him lives on in the child who is left behind. The clever, enchant- ing Heinz embodied those precious aspects of his mother that Freud could not bear to lose. If Heinz were still alive, Sophie was not altogether dead.
    The full emotional impact of Sophie’s death did not register with Freud until Heinz dragged what remained of his mother into the grave with him.
    In August of 1923, three months after Heinz’s death, Freud was aware he might never recover from this loss. To his colleague Max Eitingon, he wrote, “I am obsessesed by impotent longing for the dear child.” 12 He confessed to his cherished friend Oscar Rie, “He meant the future to me and thus has taken the future away with him.” 13
    This loss of the future had been immediately preceded by another calamity. In April of 1923, a leukoplakia in Freud’s mouth was thought to be pre-cancerous. The growth was removed, but the surgeon had not taken any of the necessary precautions to prevent or minimize shrinkage of the scar. Four months later, two months after little Heinz had died, Freud wrote to a friend that he had not been out of pain since the surgery. However, Freud said that what troubled him most was the emotional pain of losing his grandson. “It is the secret of the indifference—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life.” 14 He felt he could never love anyone else again, not even his other grandchildren.
    When a human being feels “castrated” and humiliated by the suffering he is enduring, the erotic colorations of life diminish in intensity, very often yielding to destructive fantasies and actions. What happened to Freud in the years immediately following the calamities of 1923, and some of his own insights into how it changed the ways in which he looked at life, can show how this particular culture of fetishism—the humiliation of a physical or emotional wound that cannot be assuaged—might affect any human being.
    Initially, I will be going into some detail about the physical sufferings that attended the surgeries on Freud’s mouth and nasal passages. Later in this chapter I will be connecting these details with