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

By Matthew Von Unwerth

Book Overview

Freud's 1915 essay On Transiencerecorded a summertime conversation with two unnamed companions-who were thought to be poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas- Salom?. In Freud's Requiem,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157322247X
• ISBN13: 9781573222471
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Entertaing and informative introduction for many

As a reader familiar with the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, but who despaired in finding a text that explains the history and underpinings of Freud's theories, I found this book a godsend. Quite frankly, I need to have strong prose to bolster my interest and the author doesn't disappoint, beginning with a very literary conceit, the possibilities suggested by the meeting btw Freud and Rilke; his style consistently engages the reader and makes Freudian theory relevant by introducing it through the universal experiences of mourning and loss. He more than answers the question of Freud's continued importantance in the age of Wellbutrin and Prozac.

Fascinating Freud

A very favorable review in the New York Times led me to "Freud's Requiem." The book gave me a fascinating entry into the world of Freudian thought and concise explanations of many of Freud's key concepts, including his view of love, memory, repression sublimation, mourning,and death. It also told intriguing stories of Freud's relationships with figures, including Nietzsche, Rilke and the little-known, remarkable, serial lover, Lou Andreas-Salome. And, the book provided delightful tidbits, like Freud's teenage enjoyment at reciting the Gettysburg Address - in English - and his first scientific discovery that eels are bisexuals. I came away with a new understanding of how Freud connected literature and art with his theories and a greater appreciation of his personal struggles to arrive at his insights in how we think, feel and react. "Freud's Requiem" does require some mental exertion, but I felt better after the workout.

A transporting evocation of extraordinary people, their ideas and their epoch

I picked up Freud's Requiem just after putting down Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant and monumental literary biography of Shakespeare. That was a happy coincidence for me, because it made me see how much these two very fine books have in common. Matthew von Unwerth, a first-book author, is no Stephen Greenblatt, who has eight books written and six books edited to his credit, and holds a distinguished place in academia as University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. And Sigmund Freud is no William Shakespeare, although the venerable father of psychoanalysis had an important impact on our understanding of the human condition in the twentieth century. What von Unwerth and Greenblatt have in common that makes both of these books eminently worth reading are two characteristics: a love for language, and a gift for drawing connections between their subjects' creative output and their physical, mental and historical contexts. Freud as a human being--suffering, grieving, mourning and simply carrying on in the face of Kaiser Wilhelm's and Adolph Hitler's destruction of his world and later his own struggle with cancer--is one of three principal characters in Freud's Requiem's story, which reads like a novel. Avid mushroom hunter, devoted father, scientist, literary figure, friend and rival--Freud was at the center of European culture between 1895 and 1939. Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Europe's most important poets in the period between the two world wars, was an acquaintance who fascinated Freud, and enriched the love life of Freud's friend and fellow analyst, Lou Andreas-Salome. "Frau Lou", as she was known by many, was as prolific a lover as she was a writer, having engaged in affairs with, and attracted proposals of marriage from, a substantial proportion of Europe's intelligentsia, including Rilke and Friedrich Nietzche, among many others. Although Freud's Requiem entertains as a story of three important and fascinating characters of the real "Old Europe", it also provides a message of hope for readers who, like Rilke and Frau Lou, find melancholy in the mortality of all things bright and beautiful, and who have not yet learned the value of mourning in coming to grips with the tragic realities of life.

Enriching, Illuminating and Beautifully Written...

Every now and then we happen upon a book that surprises, delights and educates--- a book like Dava Sobol's "Longitude," for example, or "The Professor and the Madman." Such a book comes unexpectedly into our field of vision, being outside our usual reading fare, and ends up broadening that field. Matthew von Unwerth's book, short though it is, intrigues in at least three ways: It illumines Freud's thoughts about grief, mourning and the transience of life. It thrusts the reader dramatically into the intellectual world of Freud's Vienna: Rilke, Jung, and others in their circle. Finally, it tells the story of Freud's life in poignant terms as the aging Freud, eschewing the comfort of religion, copes stoically with age, exile and the ravages of disease. Added to the delight of the fascinating subject matter is the lambent beauty of von Unwerth's prose style, a style that is always direct and clear (one thinks of Bertrand Russell) but lyrical at the same time. This short book is long on both style and substance. It illumines and educates. It lingers in the mind, provoking one's own thoughts long after the final page. What more can we ask of any book?