Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, BBC Four

From Freud's unconscious to Dawkins's Selfish Gene: a brief but fascinating journey

by Fisun GunerMonday, 01 August 2011

Sigmund Freud, with a man from the BBC: the only voice recording Freud ever made was for the corporation

The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."

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