The Death of Sigmund Freud The Legacy of His Last Days by Mark Edmundson
Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $25.95
The story goes that when the Nazis raided Berggasse 19 in Vienna in March 1938, they were helping themselves to the contents of the family safe when there appeared from the back of the apartment an old, ill, bearded specter, more wraith than man. Sigmund Freud gave them a stare that only he could give, and the thugs took the money and ran. The anecdote might be apocryphal, but it endures because it's emblematic of Freud's relationship to authoritarian figures in general: He saw right through them.
What Freud would have seen in Hitler is the subject of Mark Edmundson's The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days. Chronologically the book covers the period between March 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and Freud reluctantly agreed to flee Vienna for London, and September 1939, the start of World War II and the death of Sigmund Freud. Psychologically it parallels two personalities: a Hitler who wouldn't shut up, declaring himself an expert on a subject and then talking about it for hours, as Edmundson writes (quoting Don DeLillo) in "endless monologues, free associating"; and a Freud who repeatedly demonstrated, in Edmundson's own words, "that there was nothing that crossed his mind that he would not write down and publish."
Edmundson doesn't push the comparison any further, and he never descends to the kind of pop psychoanalysis that a further comparison would require. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Read? as well as Towards Reading Freud, and the introduction to Adam Phillips's reissue of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Edmundson takes Freud's ideas on their own philosophically provocative, artistically demanding, terms. His conclusion about Freud's fascination with authoritarian figures is, like much of this book, both simple and profound: Takes one to know one.
"Anyone who had been reading Freud," Edmundson writes, "would not have been terribly surprised by the events of March 1938." In 1921, Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, a meditation on mass worship of political authority--in particular, as Edmundson writes, "the man with the masterly aura," the leader who "is always sure that his vision is the one true vision." In 1927, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud examined how this mass "addiction to the patriarch" manifests itself in religion. "Like the dictator," Edmundson paraphrases Freud, "the sky god introduces clarity into situations that are overcomplicated."
Which brings Freud back to a favorite subject: Moses. In 1914, on a visit to Rome, Freud found himself unable to stop contemplating Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses and, characteristically, he struggled to articulate why on paper. In his essay "The Moses of Michelangelo" Freud argued that the sculpture captures Moses at the moment he discovers his followers worshipping the golden calf. Yet in Freud's interpretation, as Edmundson says, "Moses never throws down the tablets in rage." Why not? Why would Moses--a man who was sure that his vision of a God in the sky was the one true vision--simply sit and glower?
Twenty years later, Freud was still asking himself that question. "Moses won't let go of my imagination," Freud wrote a friend in 1935. By the time the Nazis invaded Austria, Freud had completed the first two chapters of the manuscript that would become Moses and Monotheism. He continued working on the final chapter while waiting for news of whether his bribes were sufficient to guarantee his family safe passage out of the country. He carried the manuscript with him when he fled Vienna, and he continued working on it in London, in a race against the cancer that was devouring his face. The book would serve, Edmundson writes, as "something like an intellectual last will and testament for Freud, and for psychoanalysis."
One of two intellectual last wills and testaments, actually. While Edmundson doesn't dwell on the scientific aspect of Freud's background--understandably, for the purposes of this book--Freud did. During the 1880s he was one of the more prominent neuroanatomists in Vienna, first as a researcher, then both in private practice and as the director of a neurological institute. Only later, in the mid-1890s, when he found that he couldn't account for some psychical phenomena through cause-and-effect neurological processes, did he decisively abandon the study of the brain for the study of the mind.
But he never abandoned the assumption that advances in neurophysiology would validate psychoanalytic findings, and so after completing Moses and Monotheism he began work on a new book, asserting to the end that "the phenomena with which we were dealing do not belong to psychology alone; they have an organic and biological side as well." An Outline of Psycho-Analysis would serve as his last will and testament for psychoanalysis on an empirical level.
But Freud had always indulged in the non-empirical as well. In 1895, struggling one last time to locate the unconscious in the pathways of the brain, he urged a friend to "not refrain from publishing even conjectures. One cannot do without people who have the courage to think new things before they are in a position to demonstrate them." Freud, however, thought he lacked that courage. "I take no pride in having avoided speculation," he wrote 10 years later. Only 10 years after that, in 1915, his immediately post-"Moses of Michelangelo" period, did he concede the speculative origins of the unconscious: "A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience." Now, in the final year of his life, he published a book that, as Edmundson writes, "was as bold and speculative a piece of work as he had ever attempted." Moses and Monotheism would serve as Freud's last will and testament for psychoanalysis on a metaphorical level.
In Freud's reimagining of Exodus, the significance of Moses' monotheism was not just the idea of one God but the idea of an invisible God. The intellectual capacity to believe in an "abstract idea" rather than a "sensory perception" was, in Freud's words, "a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality." To Freud, Edmundson adds, "God is still a figure to displace, but belief in him is a necessary stage on the way to a far better belief." It would lead to "the true development of the mind." It would be essential for developments "in mathematics, in law, in science, and in literary art--in all the activities, in other words, that involve making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life." And it would allow the kind of introspection that would become the basis of psychoanalysis: "belief in that internal, unseen structure that Freud calls the psyche."
In this interpretation, the spectacle that awaited Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai--the Israelites worshipping the golden calf--was more than a rejection of monotheism. It also represented a cultural, intellectual step backward. Yet what allowed Moses to keep his rage in check--at least in Freud's radical 1938 elaboration on his already radical 1914 interpretation of what Michelangelo might have been trying to portray--was that he himself hadn't abandoned the cultural, intellectual step forward. Because Moses possessed the power of abstraction, he could control his inner turmoil--and become a new kind of authority figure.
"Moses is flesh of sublimation," Freud said to Salvador Dalí, one of the notables who called on him at his Maresfield Gardens home in London. (Others included H.G. Wells, prominent scientists from the Royal Society, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, whose Hogarth Press published Freud in English.) It is from this "ability to sublimate" that Moses not only masters his emotions but "gains his authority as a leader," Edmundson writes. "Freud's Moses, unlike the archetypal leader, lives with conflict and anxiety, and he does so in the interests of civilization."
Edmundson's objective, however, isn't merely to summarize Moses and Monotheism. Like Freud's, his concerns are cultural. Because of the value of abstraction to civilization in general, and the value of sublimation in a leader in particular, Edmundson contends, "There is no social ceremony more antithetical to Judaic and psychoanalytical inwardness than the mass rally."
The application of the religious lessons of The Future of an Illusion to today Edmundson makes explicit. "In the twenty-first century a stranglingly intolerant version of faith is abroad not only throughout the Islamic world, but in the United States of America," which "has a sizable constituency who wish for little so much as religious rule by the state, theocracy." The application of the political lessons of Group Psychology, however, he leaves implicit, though unmistakable.
Not that he pushes the comparison between political leaders then and now. But as he did with Hitler and Freud, Edmundson underscores similarities in situations and personalities that speak to mass adulation of a certain type of authority. When "the world seems most disordered, incoherent, and inconsistent, and when humanity seems to be drowning in its own confusion," he writes, we want a leader who seems "to have perfect confidence, to need no one, and to be entirely self-sufficient"--who exudes "a sense of being whole. Suddenly we are not at war within ourselves. The sense of anxiety departs and we feel free."
But the sense of wholeness, the feeling of freedom, are illusions. "Freud affirms not inner peace but inner conflict," Edmundson says. "He believes that the inner tensions we experience within the psyche are by and large necessary tensions. This is so not because the tensions are enjoyable in themselves--they are not--but because the alternatives are so much worse."
No storm-tossed ship of state needs a Hamlet at the helm. Freud knew Hamlet; Freud treated Hamlet almost as if he were a patient (in The Interpretation of Dreams); Moses was no Hamlet. Edmundson writes, "What Moses surely suggests to Freud--and should suggest to us--is that it may be possible to be an authority, to have an influence, without being a conventional patriarch." This was the model of authority that Freud tried to emulate, certainly in his private practice, but also in his writing. He was, Edmundson concludes, "the great cultural patriarch, who stood for nothing so much as for the dismantling of patriarchy."
What Freud saw in the Moses of Michelangelo in 1914 was himself, even if he didn't consciously make the connection for another 20 years. The gaze that Moses leveled at the Israelites is the gaze that Freud leveled at the Nazi looters. It is the gaze, Edmundson argues, that we should all level at our leaders. But it is a gaze that is available only to someone who has looked through himself to see the worshipper--and the looter--within.
Richard Panek is the author of The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes.