Book Reviews

The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism by Mark Edmundson. Bloomsbury.

When Hitler invaded Vienna in the winter of 1938, Sigmund Freud, old and desperately ill, was among the city’s 175,000 Jews dreading Nazi occupation. Here Mark Edmundson traces Hitler and Freud’s oddly converging lives, then zeroes in on the last two years of Freud’s life, during which he was rescued and brought to London. Edmundson probes Freud’s ideas about secular death and the rise of fascism and fundamentalism, and grapples with the place of psychoanalysis after Freud’s death now that religious fundamentalism is once again shaping world events.

Jonathan Derbyshire in the Guardian wrote that ‘Edmundson deftly entwines the gripping story of the dying Freud’s flight to England after the Anschluss in 1938 with a persuasive case for his standing as a political thinker. A riveting read’

Freud showed how charismatic leaders such as Hitler – or, for that matter, Stalin or Mussolini – promise eternal peace in place of conflict, plenitude in place of lack. That promise is, of course, illusory (disastrously so), but no less powerful or alluring for that. The absolute leader “satisfies the human hunger to rise above time and chance and join with something more powerful and more enduring than merely transient, mortal enterprise”. Fascism and fundamentalism are where “humanity will go without potent efforts of resistance”. This book is a timely reminder of that stark warning, and of the usefulness of psychoanalytic ideas in exploring such distressing aspects of the human psyche. At a time when Donald Trump is standing for the U.S. presidency it makes illuminating reading.

Alan Bellamy