Abstract
Although focused on the last two years of Freud’s life, The Death of Sigmund Freud begins decades earlier, juxtaposing two inhabitants of Vienna in 1909: Freud at fifty-three, well on in developing psychoanalysis, with an already considerable following; and Adolf Hitler in his twenties, living abstemiously, doing odd jobs, scavenging, nursing grudges against art schools that judged him untalented, and giving impromptu, frenzied, at times ridiculed talks in the men’s shelter in which he lived—about corrupt establishments, hateful Jews and Communists, and Germany’s exalted destiny. The story then skips to 1938–1939 and remains there—when, having been cited for heroism in World War I, politically energized thereafter, and in time triumphant, Hitler, as Chancellor of Germany and at the height of his power, marched into Austria, annexed it to the Reich, and set in motion the steps that led to World War II. Edmundson describes the Anschluss, which set off a “witches’ Sabbath” of celebrations throughout Austria and immediate attacks, humiliations, arrests, and killings of Jews that, described vividly, puts one in touch with the terrors of that moment and the horrors that followed: the Holocaust, and staggering numbers of war dead.
The initial—to me startling—contrast of Freud and Hitler sets the narrative pattern for the book, which offers alternating, usually brief sections devoted to each man’s thoughts, actions, and influence, managing thereby to trace a fateful era of European civilization in concentrated, often striking detail. At times the ironies register strongly. Eventually we learn more of the Annexation and its effects and aftereffects on the populace than we do of Hitler, although his domineering allure is rendered clearly. The tale is finely crafted. Its bearing on psychoanalytic thought is intriguing.
By late February 1938 Freud was recovering from two recent operations on his cancerous jaw, a pain-filled condition he had endured for fifteen years. The awkward prosthesis for his mouth interfered with his speech and habitual cigar smoking, but post-surgically this time it was causing extreme and exhausting pain. Already in his eighties, Freud was frail and weary yet still mentally sharp, assertive in his convictions as in his wit. When Nazi thugs invaded 19 Berggasse and left with all the money in the home, he commented, “I have never gotten as much for a single visit.” He worried, of course, about the future of psychoanalysis, the safety of his family, and, given the exigency of fascism, the emerging world. But despite age, agony, upset, and his own readiness to die, he continued thinking and writing about psychoanalysis. One work in particular remained unfinished, which Edmundson suggests had culminating significance: the Moses book. It continued and extended a turn Freud had taken midway in his career. By first recognizing the unconscious and bringing it to consciousness, he had relieved symptoms. He’d interpreted dreams, parapraxes, and jokes, offered illustrative case studies as well as a defining theory of infantile sexuality leading to the oedipus complex, latency, puberty, and the burgeoning and burdens of actual adulthood. He’d begun a series of metapsychological essays. Always he wrote prodigiously, boldly, cogently. But increasingly, too, he pondered people’s expectations and judgments of themselves that would find a crucial place in his later, “structural” theory, with its conceptualization of an Over-I, or superego, which usually acts unconsciously and can be cruelly damaging to a struggling ego. Edmundson respects the Over-I as the locus of inner authority, of expectation of self, but also as opening to the more generalized problem of authority in groups. He proves fascinated by Freud’s human stature and influence, as well as by the hold Hitler, as patriarchal leader, had over hordes of German and Austrian devotees.
An irony he recognizes is that Freud too exerted a patriarchal control over his followers, insisting on their sticking to his basic precepts. The history of psychoanalysis thus includes rebellions and breakaways of major protegés, such as Adler, Jung, and Rank. The central focus of Freud’s thought, however, merging clinical experience and theory, involved humans remaining uniquely themselves though never completely knowing themselves. Psychoanalysis can serve self-awareness and help loosen punishing ties to one’s past. But individuals remain to some extent conflicted, the ego, or “I,” answering to three masters—reality, the superego, and the ever desirous id (Freud 1923, p. 56). Dynamics usually proceed unconsciously, or without preceding awareness, however well we learn to recognize and reflect about them. We are divided beings, never utterly in control of ourselves. That, however, is exactly what groups zealously following a domineering and simplifying leader can accomplish, why murderous and powerful tyrants rise up repeatedly through human history. Their followers find the solace of certainty, the pleasure of assigning moral direction to the leader and together indulging instinctual permissiveness, which is dependably hateful. Freud had written about this in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921). What Hitler brought to the vast German and Austrian majority, Emundson explains, “from the perspective of Freud’s thinking at least, was an elixir like no other: he brought unity. Persons were divided in themselves; nations were split: the leader pulled all the achingly disparate parts together and dispensed a feeling of oneness. He healed the fragmented psyche—provided one did not wish to think for oneself, make one’s own ethical judgments or interpret things in one’s fashion—and he healed the broken polis, so long as one was not a Jew, a Gypsy, or a Christian who took too seriously the teachings of Jesus” (pp. 122–123). In that essay on group psychology, Freud did not ponder or include cultural, economic, or social history. He stuck with the transferential dynamics of followers and leaders, and he brought similar assumptions to fundamentalisms of all stripes, including organized religions (Freud l927).
Edmundson takes us through the run-up to the War: the German demand for Sudetenland, Chamberlain’s “peace in our time,” Kristallnacht, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the invasion of Poland. He details the various efforts—by his daughter Anna, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, various diplomats, even F.D.R., and an enigmatic, highly placed Nazi rogue, Dr. Sauerwald—to enable Freud and his family to get to England, where he was warmly received. Edmundson also reflects on Moses and Monotheism, which was finally completed at Maresfield Gardens and, despite pleas by both Jews and gentiles that it not be, sent into the world in 1939. It was met with skepticism and consternation, though Freud, who never minded being provocative and stirring resistances, felt satisfied.
Scholarly and admittedly somewhat speculative, the work offers a metahistorical analogue to Freud’s understanding of individual development and recapitulates aspects of Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912–1913). Tracing the emergence of monotheism, it involves stages attained by early mankind, repressed, moved beyond, and at a later time reactivated. Moses, Freud contends, was an Egyptian, loyal to Iknahton, the Pharaoh who proclaimed the monotheistic cult of Aton for all of Egypt. When Iknahton died young, and Egyptians yearned for their local polytheistic gods, Moses brought Iknahton’s religion to a minority people who would in time become the Jews. He brought the Egyptian practice of circumcision, led them out of Egypt, and taught them the religion’s severely strict moral ways. In the desert they rebelled and killed him, after which matriarchy succeeded for a time. Much later, remorse and guilt set in, the volcano god Yahweh of related tribes merged with the more pacific Egyptian group, and Moses was remembered—the return of the repressed rule-giving patriarch—and honored; and monotheism thereafter was associated with the Jews and their invisible God, father of the world. Edmundson stresses Freud’s emphasis on the importance of monotheism in the genealogy of humanity. For locating God in the mind constituted an advance in intellectuality. An invisible God not externally, sensually perceived is a major development in the direction of inner awareness and personal, authoritative responsibility—toward civilized, conflicted humans, capable but vulnerable.
The Death of Sigmund Freud ends with the founder’s work living on, aiding and informing individuals in large part by deconstructing encoded and powerfully unyielding authorities from childhood, often—but not solely—patriarchal. He himself stands as the paradoxical patriarch of a complex discipline of thought and process that demystifies patriarchy and respects individuals who wrestle with troubling inner conflicts stemming from childhood. Edmundson’s book also depicts the fearsome effectiveness of a tyrannical leader and the massive group transference to him that changed the course of history. The book is a good read.
It also leaves implicit ongoing challenges for psychoanalysis. One is how to gauge Freud’s or any other psychoanalyst’s or psychoanalytic school’s authority, indeed how to adapt the many subsequent clinical and theoretical amplifications workably. Another is whether—and if so, how—psychoanalysis might contribute not only to group therapies but specifically to mediating between hostile large groups or nations, to their reconciliation and coexistence; further, whether psychoanalysis might be able to do so without itself being drawn into political ideology. In several troubled areas of the globe, Vamik Volkan has made notable contributions in that way (see, e.g., Volkan 2013), while in Northern Ireland the psychiatrist Lord John Alderdice has helped shape an actively political and viable peace. Freud’s heritage continues to amplify, inwardly and outwardly.