FREUD, Sigmund (1856-1939)

FREUD, Sigmund (1856-1939)
Autograph letter signed ('Sigm. Freud') to Miss Joan Poultney, 20 Maresfield Road, London, 24 October 1938.
In English, one page, 231 x 143mm. Autograph envelope (addressed to the recipient in 'Reamington [sic] Spa'). Provenance: Sotheby's, 26 May 1994, lot 31.

'I am a foreigner here friendly accepted': on his helplessness in assisting a fellow Austrian refugee. Freud thanks the recipient for 'your sympathy to that poor girl', and for trying to help her. 'But how can it be achieved? I see no way I can do nothing[.] I am a foreigner here friendly accepted but with no influence at all'; he suggests that she apply to Austrian Self Aid in New Oxford Street, 'and make some suggestion how to improve her condition'.

Freud had fled Nazi Austria on 4 June, after months of tortuous negotiations, arriving by train in London two days later. Although already suffering from the cancer of the jaw which caused his death the following year, he recreated his Vienna consulting room at his new house, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead (now the Freud Museum) and continued to see patients, as well as working on Moses and Monotheism and the unfinished An Outline of Psychoanalysis.