More than 150 years after his birth, Sigmund Freud still haunts us. His ideas creep into our language like a symptom, or like an unconscious desire. Sometimes it's all in fun, as when Brian, the thoughtful canine on Fox's "Family Guy," wondered with the therapist if his wetting the floor was an act of aggression. Sometimes it's to deepen our engagement with a narrative, as happened to Tony Soprano, in HBO's "The Sopranos," when he tried, with the help of his therapist, Dr. Melfi, to understand what it meant to be abandoned by your sister and to inherit the burdens left by your mother. Freud was declared dead in a 2005 cover story in Newsweek; the following year, the magazine ran another piece on the "debunked doctor," declaring him an "inescapable force." Freud just won't disappear, and Mark Edmundson's "The Death of Sigmund Freud" offers a compelling redescription of why the founder of psychoanalysis retains his relevance today.
Freudian analysis
The Death of Sigmund Freud The Legacy of His Last Days; Mark Edmundson; Bloomsbury: 288 pp., $25.95
Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, sees Freud's legacy in broadly cultural (not medical) terms. But he connects these general terms with Freud's emigration after the Nazi absorption of Austria and with the writing projects completed during the old man's final struggle with cancer. Edmundson's treatment of Freud's greater significance and the particular historical conditions of his life makes this brief book an engaging read.
In the fall of 1909, Edmundson notes, Vienna was home to both Freud and Adolf Hitler. The former had just returned from a triumphant lecture tour in America, the latter was down and out in Austria's cruel and splendid capital. Freud was about to soar, and Hitler seemed destined for permanent decline. Edmundson's framing device allows him an effective contrast with the late 1930s, when the aged Freud faces vicious, organized anti-Semitism and the perversely energetic Hitler plans his return to Vienna to take control.
