Book Review

The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days

N Engl J Med 2008; 358:436-437January 24, 2008

Article

The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days
By Mark Edmundson. 276 pp. New York, Bloomsbury, 2007. $25.95. ISBN: 978-1-58234-537-6

This book is a contemporary reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's last years and of his current significance. Although Freud's ideas are increasingly on the margins of contemporary psychiatry, Edmundson's book makes it clear that they continue to have an effect on the broader culture.

Drawing almost exclusively from secondary sources and previously published primary sources, Edmundson covers the period from March 1938 to Freud's death on September 23, 1939. The first part of the book is an extensive reflection on the lives of Freud and of Adolf Hitler in Vienna, in which Edmundson retells the story of the period in Hitler's early adulthood when he lived in Vienna as an impoverished artist and then discusses the problems Freud confronted as the Nazi influence increased in Austria. The second part of the book is a recounting of Freud's arrival in London and his life there. Edmundson describes the chain of events that led Freud to decide to move from Vienna to London in June 1938 and his interactions with various devotees before his death — mostly relatives, psychoanalysts, and cultural notables such as Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, and Salvador Dalí.

Edmundson, a professor of literature at the University of Virginia, interacts with Freud on a literary level in a sort of prolonged literary reflection on Freud's later work. His presentation of Freud's thought is laced with comparisons to the thought of a host of literary lights: William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, John Milton, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, and others. Despite the historical appearance of the book, though, Edmundson decontextualizes and idealizes Freud. He takes Freud out of his medical context almost entirely, minimizing the reality that although psychoanalysis has become something of a fixture in Western culture, its status as a scientific theory is in decline. The book contains a fairly lengthy bibliography and 234 brief endnotes, but it skims across the surface of relevant scholarship on Freud, plucking out what strikes the author's fancy and ignoring the rest. Edmundson writes about Freud's views of America without referring to the two volumes on Freud and Freudianism in the United States by Nathan G. Hale, Jr., and he ignores Frank Sulloway's influential biography, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (first published in 1979).

Edmundson's Freud is a postreligion thinker who can serve as a guide for life in the current world situation and whose concepts have a practical use and a political application. Although Freud's ideas about religion are central to this book, Edmundson accepts these ideas uncritically and does not engage the thoughts of many other writers on Freud's religion who have taken different and more historically nuanced approaches. Edmundson writes as though major works on Freud's view of God by Hans Küng, William W. Meissner, Gregory Zilboorg, and others did not exist.

At about page 150, this book becomes a lengthy critique of fundamentalism and “patriarchal religion,” both of which Edmundson associates with fascism. He apparently believes that psychoanalysis offers a way forward for humanity, explaining that, “To Freud, the self-aware person is continually in the process of deconstructing various god replacements. . . . He feels, on balance, more than fortunate to be alive. Such people can be quite formidable when they're pushed to the wall. (Fundamentalists and fascists should be warned.)” In truth, to offer up a postmodern literary interpretation of Freud's sociological and anthropologic works as a solution to the political ills of the world is naive.

Psychoanalytic “enlightenment” comes with extensive psychotherapy and reflection, and it is a luxury that few can afford even in the West. Although this book is postmodern in outlook, it takes a rather old-fashioned Whig approach to history that portrays Freud as a man ahead of his time whose thought can be isolated from historical context and universalized. For those who have more than a passing acquaintance with Freud, there is little new in this book and much to take issue with.

Samuel B. Thielman, M.D., Ph.D.
Health Unit, U.S. Embassy, 00621 Nairobi, Kenya