Scope and Content Note
The papers of Max Schur (1897-1969) span the years 1923-1974 and include correspondence, subject files, and writings. They feature Schur's career in medicine and teaching, with the focus on his early role as physician to Sigmund Freud from 1928 to 1939 and on his activities after World War II as a writer and lecturer on psychoanalytic topics. The papers are organized into the following series: Correspondence, Subject File, and Writings File.
The most notable aspect of the Schur Papers is the material he retained and collected pertaining to Freud's medical treatment. Largely original, the core items on this topic were received from another of Freud's personal physicians, Hans Pichler, who forwarded to Schur the medical case history he had begun in 1923. Among the documents are letters, x-rays, prescriptive data, and other material reflecting the care and diagnoses of Freud's ailments. Also present is Schur's account of Freud's long struggle with cancer, first in the form of a retrospective effort by Schur to aid Ernest Jones in the writing of his multivolume biography and then as part of an analytical manuscript published posthumously under Schur's name as Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972). Files from Schur's book-length study consist of various notes and research data and are accompanied by voluminous drafts of the publication in progress.
After Schur immigrated to the United States in 1939, he became eminent in the area of psychosomatic medicine, especially for his work on metapsychological insight. Reflected in the Writings File are his contributions in this field, his depictions of Freud as both psychoanalyst and person, and his discussions of anxiety, instinct, and mental processes. These are issues which also appear with some frequency in the Correspondence series, including in a few letters of Sigmund Freud as well as correspondence with other prominent writers and individuals of the period. Among the main correspondents are Princess Marie Bonaparte, Martin Buber, Hilda Doolittle, Anna Freud, Ernst L. Freud, Ernest Jones, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling, and Arnold Zweig.
In the Subject File are materials relating to the United Restitution Organization, which supported psychological victims of the Holocaust, and several folders treating the reaction within the Freudian inner circle to the publication in 1967 by William C. Bullitt of Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. Correspondence and other files outline the role of Schur and others, especially Anna Freud and Erik H. Erikson, in opposing Bullitt's attribution of Freud as coauthor of the study.