Through Clouds of Smoke: Freud’s Final Days

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founding father of psychoanalysis, is portrayed in this cogent graphic biography as a scholar and stoic who is ultimately as flawed and prone to vices as his patients. Leclair and Roy focus their English-language debut on the final years of “the man who is disturbing the world’s sleep,” touching on Freud’s famed dream analysis but more poignantly on how his faith in medicine and in humanity itself are put to the test. An “inveterate smoker,” Freud’s refusal to quit leads to cancer. His declining health, first gradual then precipitous, mirrors the plight of his native Austria as encroaching fascism and Hitler’s Nazi Party lay waste to Europe’s cultural centers. Talented young physician Max Schur vows to stand by his “dear colleague” until the end of his life; Freud’s minor sores and aches lead to convalescence and painful physical decay with the passage of time marked by his cigar turning to ash in a tray. Leclair’s lovely ink wash drawings capture all the internal and external conflicts, the details of jaw surgery juxtaposed with scenes of book burning in Berlin. This sophisticated work lays out a complex case study, worthy of the kind of close analysis that so enthralled its subject. (Dec.)