The astonishing story Freud recounts to Colette and Younger demonstrating the accuracy of one of his dream interpretations — in which Freud correctly deduces that a patient witnessed an affair between the patient's nurse and a family groomsman when the patient was about four years old — is entirely true, or at any rate is attested to by the patient herself, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie, however, did not begin her consultation with Freud until 1925, so the story is not in correct time sequence in my book. As in The Interpretation of Murder, many of Freud's statements in The Death Instinct are drawn from his actual writings. Although it is common today to refer to Freud's death drive by the name of Thanatos' (after a Greek god of death), Freud never did so in his writings, and accordingly that term does not appear in my pages. He does refer to the death goddess Atropos in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets,' a 1913 essay that contains the key to the symbolism of The Death Instinct. Freud lived in Vienna until 1938, when he narrowly escaped Nazi persecution. He died in England in 1939.
