Freud's Requiem
Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk
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- 139,00 kr
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- 139,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
