ABSTRACT
Roazen tries hard to show that Freud was partly responsible for Tausk's eventual suicide. Yet he prints Tausk's "suicide note," that is, a letter to Freud dated July 3, 1919. There is agreement that he had deep psychological problems; but the suicide was clearly overdetermined, and i t wou ld serve no purpose here to try to unravel the various motives. He asked Freud to help his beloved fiancee and continued:
When Freud informed Lou Andreas-Salome of Tausk's suicide, he modestly failed to quote this note at length, but he was totally free of the usual k ind of hypocrisy in the face of death and expressed his feelings w i t h total honesty. Roazen finds Freud's letter "shocking" but fails to note that the recipient, who had loved Tausk, took no offense at all and responded in the same
way; indeed she confessed that she felt very much as he d i d . 2 1
I n Roazen's eyes, Freud cannot do right.
