ABSTRACT

Sigmund Freud had been a member of the B'nai B'rith since 29 September 1897 and had addressed it on numerous previous occasions. The singularity of the document resides in the fact that it is the only known text by Freud that exists in two distinct versions. The first version of this lecture was composed for oral presentation, to a lay, almost exclusively Jewish audience—an audience for which Freud felt considerable personal affection. In the second version, the lecture was rewritten as an essay, expressly for printed publication, in a specialist journal, with a predominantly psychoanalytical readership. The psycho-analytic school, which has ventured on the claim that at bottom we do not believe in our own death. To reckon upon someone else's death; only a hard-hearted or wicked person would think of such a thing. Philosophers have declared that the intellectual enigma presented to primaeval man by the picture of death forced him to reflection.