FREUND TOSZEGHY, ANTON VON (1880-1920)

Anton von Freund Toszeghy, director of a brewery in Budapest, Hungary, a doctor of philosophy, and a patron of the psychoanalytic movement, was born in 1880 in Budapest and died on January 20, 1920, in Vienna, Austria. The son of a rich, ennobled industrialist who founded the state brewery of Steinbuch A. G., von Freund spent an idyllic childhood with his brother, Emil (later codirector of the brewery with him), and two sisters on a magnificent property, the remains of which are still visible next to the brewery. Here Sigmund Freud spent the summer of 1918, far from the penury of wartime, receiving visits from Sandór Ferenczi, going for carriage rides along the Danube, correcting proofs of his articles, and analyzing one of von Freund's sisters, Kata (the future wife of Lajos Lévy, a physician, analyst, and director of the Jewish Hospital).

Von Freund underwent analysis with Freud and even directed a course of an analysis, which he reported on to Freud. The two men became friends, and von Freund went on to play an important role in the psychoanalytic movement. An eminent figure in Budapest, and practical and generous in temperament, he was initially the main organizer of the Fifth Congress of 1918 and was the founder of the first center for research on child psychology (for which he recruited Melanie Klein, one of Ferenczi's patients). He financed the publishing house Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna as well as an analytic outpatient clinic in Budapest (the latter was never actually created). He died prematurely of cancer, and Freud composed a moving obituary for this "providential" man.

Michelle Moreau Ricaud

See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle ; Hungary; Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1920). Dr. Anton von Freund. SE, 18: 267-268.