When Freud died in September 1939 from a tremendous 20-year battle with cancer and with more than a little help from his family doctor's generous injections of morphine, Londoners were busy preparing for the bombing that would inevitably follow the recent declaration of war with Germany. It is interesting that Mark Edmunsen chooses to highlight Freud's contemporary relevance through a narrative of his death, when so many commentators and psychologists today would gladly have left him buried.
The book is divided in two, telling the story of Freud and Hitler in Vienna in 1938, and then focusing on Freud's last days in exile in London in 1939. Edmunsen's central premise, that Freud understood clearly how human beings come to abdicate pleasure, freedom and love, and willingly, happily, deliriously subordinate ourselves to authority and power, is intriguingly, even sometimes powerfully, presented, but there is little new in The Death of Sigmund Freud for a reader already familiar with Freud and with psychoanalysis.
Edmunsen is particularly compelling when discussing the reluctant importance that being a Jew played in Freud's life, writings and ideology, and when describing how Freud's desire to live and write conflicted with his cancer and weakness for big fat cigars. It is, in short, when Edmunsen humanises Freud that this work is most effective, as a very personal biography, of a particular man marching towards death.
In ‘Vienna’, Edmunsen shows Freud and Hitler in the same world, walking the same streets, circling one another, but only to show them as completely alien to one another, rather than illustrating the more remarkable case that these were, in fact, two men who did inhabit the same world and walk the same streets. For Freud, the Nazis were not a ‘special invention of the Germans’ (p. ), but a particular manifestation of an inevitable human drive. What Edmunsen could have made more apparent is that while they were not a special invention of the Germans, the Nazis were an invention, a technology that was, like the radio or the automobile or the theory of relativity or psychoanalysis itself, particular to a certain culture and point in time. Freud was not surprised that the Nazis came to be a force in Europe because he understood human nature, and also because he understood his age.
That Freud's ideas are relevant today should also not come as a surprise to anyone, and really should hardly need restating, since Freud's world is our world too: a world of fascism and fundamentalism. We flatter ourselves if we think that our world, our problems, our fascists and fundamentalists are so different from his. That all of this is not made immediately apparent in The Death of Sigmund Freud is, I think, at least in some part due to the Freud with which Edmunsen presents us. In any biography the subject is reconstructed by the author, though this is truer for no-one more than Sigmund Freud. Edmunsen's chosen Freud is the romantic hero, the man who often stands apart and rebels against the petty restrictions and regulations of his culture. Since Freud, or at least a part of Freud, liked to see himself in this way, Edmunsen's portrayal is not unjust, and it is certainly a character with whom we have become familiar over the century of Freudian scholarship. It is just that this portrayal of Freud somewhat clouds our understanding of the historical Freud, and an appreciation of how his ideas work, then and now. Further danger of indulging too much in the romantic view of Freud is that it opens the door to exactly the sort of tyranny that Freud warns us to avoid, and which Edmunsen otherwise intelligently addresses: the overinvestment in the hero and the abandonment of ambivalence for the easy comforts of authority.
Edmunsens's conclusion is somewhat confused, mirroring too often I think Freud's naïve and vain belief in Enlightened ‘civilisation’ with Edmunsen's own naïve and vain belief in ‘democracy’, and I suppose that it is unfair to expect Edmunsen to provide a thorough consideration of the socio-economic bases for modern fundamentalism, but his conclusion offers narrow views of some more potently difficult and complex issues.
I would dearly have liked to have loved this book, but I do not because it does not sufficiently challenge my understanding of Freud, psychoanalysis, a certain historical moment or the modern world. However, as an introduction to Freud, Freudian theory and Freudian thinking on group behaviour, it is exceptional: clear, accessible and intriguing. This book about the death of Sigmund Freud will make Freud come alive, and provide a good launching point to go and then read Fromm and Winnicott. Or, even better, to go and read more Freud.
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