Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk

by Matthew Von Unwerth

Overview

In this absorbing, thoughtful narrative, a young writer explores Sigmund Freud’s provocative ideas on creativity and mortality and their roots in his history, while searching for broader lessons about love, memory, mourning, and creativity.

Written in 1915 during winter and wartime, Freud’s little-known essay On Transience records an afternoon conversation with “a young but already famous poet” and his “taciturn friend” about mortality, eternity, and the “sense” of life. In Freud’s Requiem, the philosophical disagreement between Freud and his companions—who may have been the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his muse and former lover Lou Andreas-Salomé—becomes a prism through which to consider Freud’s creativity as a response to his own experiences, from his passionately curious, lovestruck teenage years to his death after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources—Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, as well as Freud’s own writings, including his letters—Freud’s Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and a spirited intellectual inquiry.

By tracing the connections among Freud’s ideas, his personality, and the world he lived in, Matthew von Unwerth examines the links that Freud made between art and memory. Freud’s Requiem contemplates how, in mourning, we tell stories about our lives that give form and meaning to the events and feelings that threaten to overwhelm us. In recounting our stories, especially our darkest moments, we make sense of them and reclaim lost aspects of our lives, just as Freud did in his account of an afternoon walk with a poet and a taciturn companion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440627965
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/07/2005
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	421 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Matthew von Unwerth is director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, and a coordinator of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination. He is a candidate in psychoanalytic training in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

During the summer of 1913, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, and their mutual friend Lou Andreas-Salom took a walk, which allowed Freud to crystallize his thinking about mortality, nature, art, and life's meaning into the short but remarkable essay "On Transience" (included as an appendix). This requiem by von Unwerth, director of the A.A. Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and an advanced candidate in psychoanalytic training, is delicate, powerful, and full of beauty, suggesting in prose that floats like music that Freud's insistence on real mourning is more mature than Rilke's avoidance and wishful thinking. As a joint biography of Freud and Rilke, the book touches on Nietzsche, Jung, Anna Freud, and others and bears touches of Homer and Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller. Rilke died tragically in 1926 at 51; Freud, then 70, lived 13 more years with a nasty cancer of the palate. The lives of these two masters of language and thought make such a powerful story that one wonders why it took so long to hear it. Essential for most libraries and for humanists and scientists alike.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A thoughtful riff on Sigmund Freud's brief 1915 essay "On Transience," in which he considers death and mourning. Von Unwerth, director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, takes us back to 1913 when Freud began a brief relationship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a meeting that occasioned "On Transience" (text appears in appendix). After a brief account of the meeting with Rilke, von Unwerth traces the careers of both men-and of their mutual friendship with Lou Andreas-Salome, who met Rilke in 1897 and who became his lover and confidant in the ensuing years. Fifteen years older than Rilke, Andreas-Salome broke with him in 1900 but remained a potent figure in his life and imagination. Rilke came to resist a friendship with Freud-and with psychoanalysis. Andreas-Salome, in fact, dissuaded Rilke from therapy, fearing that treatment might exorcise the very demons that animated his art. Von Unwerth is an unabashed fan of Freud, so seldom is heard a discouraging word in this exploration of Freud's ideas. We learn that the famed psychoanalyst was an "Oxfordian" who believed that Edward de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's plays, and that he was influenced greatly by philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Writes von Unwerth: "For Freud, as for Schiller, poetry and life were bound together inescapably in time. It is eternity, and the "eternal" nature of art, that is illusory. What gives both meaning, sense, and vitality is the certainty of death." Concerned throughout with issues of mortality, the author offers details of the deaths of his principals and reminds us that Freud had 31 painful surgeries on his face to retard the cancer that wouldhave killed him had not his physician administered, near the end, a merciful overdose of morphine. An interesting disquisition on a small moment that would loom large in Freud's imagination.

Kirkus Reviews

Psychoanalyst Von Unwerth's lyrical meditation focuses on an obscure and largely unexamined essay of Freud's, "On Transience," which he wrote in 1915, when he was almost 60. Unwerth mines the brief piece (reprinted in an appendix) for its biographical content. In the essay Freud describes talking about mortality on a walk in the countryside with friends whom Unwerth identifies as the writer Lou Andr as Salom and her former lover Rainer Maria Rilke. Outlining biographies of the couple, and revealing Freud's paternal relationship to both, Von Unwerth stages an extended meditation on Freud's emotional and intellectual life at the time: "Freud's sentimental prose poem opens to reveal a panorama of the mind of the man who wrote it, a mind that, for all its generative brilliance, is as sentimental, troubled, and torn as that of any of his patients...." Emphasizing the literary qualities of Freud's work, and providing various proofs of the aging psychoanalyst's nostalgic relationship to his own past, including the locales of his childhood and the experience of lost adolescent love, Unwerth proffers biographical interpretations of Freud's theories on love, attachment, narcissism, grief and mourning, in an accessible, intriguing and daringly speculative study of a little-known work by the "father of psychoanalysis." (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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