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

Matthew Von Unwerth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826480322 ISBN 13: 9780826480323

Publisher: Continuum, 2006

Synopsis

Matthew von Unwerth explores Sigmund Freud's provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing. Taking as his starting point the essay On Transience, Von Unwerth, examines the origins of human creativity from a psychoanalytic standpoint, tracing the arc of Freud's beliefs on the subject from his passionately curious teenage years to his death after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources - from the Odyssey to Goethe to Freud's earliest letters - Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and an absorbing intellectual debate.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Von Unwerth is the director of the Abraham 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.

From 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 Andréas Salomé 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)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826480322
• ISBN 13: 9780826480323
• Binding: Print on Demand (Hardcover)
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258