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 ?Freud warned that fundamentalist tyranny would dominate the 21st century
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Freud for thought
Mark Edmundson’s new book speculates on a chance meeting between the father of psychoanalysis and Hitler in 1909, writes Gerald Isaamann
• THE DEATH OF SIGMUND FREUD •
By Mark Edmundson.
Bloomsbury £18.99
MENTION Sigmund Freud and the image most of us have of the father of psychoanalysis is of a stern, serious-faced man with a beard, something like the discipline-conscious teacher we disliked most at school.
Yet he was nothing like that. More than anything he was a man of passions, not only in his own remarkable, innate abilities and love of the magic of poetry but one who stupidly refused to give up his cigars despite knowing that smoking would kill him.
And what a charmer, too, one with an “aggressive libido”, which is why this book is so fascinating and a delight to read for those with an inquiring mind, because it wipes away our fears of a man whose name sometimes raises danger signals whenever you make that Freudian slip.
For a start, Freud distrusted democracy, deciding from his compelling examination of mankind that we were unable to sustain any such perfection of human happiness.
And he left for us a warning – that fundamentalist tyranny would dominate the 21st century.
“From the Freudian perspective, authoritarian religion and authoritarian politics are two sides of one debased coin,” Mark Edmundson tells us. “They feed off each other, borrow techniques, modes of persuasion, and iconography. They traffic in the same sorts of miracle, mystery and authority. And they are the most plausible form of human destiny.”
Edmundson has us on his side from page one with his speculative revelation of how Adolf Hitler, a down and out vagrant on the scrounge, met Freud, then prospering from the publication of his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, met in the streets of their native Vienna in the autumn of 1909.
He follows this chance encounter through Freud’s life as a persecuted Jew – Freud insisted he couldn’t have succeeded intellectually but for that burden – and we end up with Hitler’s spy, who took pity on Freud and helped the scuttling refugee from Nazism, turning up in Hampstead to see him shortly before he died.
“Nor is it entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychanalysis was a Jew,” insisted the totally confident Freud, whose last book declared that Moses wasn’t a Jew but an Egyptian.
Here are two men, Hitler and Freud, who literally changed the world and were perhaps haunted by each other. Certainly Freud, already admired round the world as a formidable man, even something of a dictator in cultural terms, according to Edmundson, wanted his work to endure.
And in the same way, Hitler, as he shovelled snow outside Vienna’s Imperial Hotel, resolved that “some day I would come back to the Imperial Hotel and walk over the red carpet in that glittering interior where the Habsburgs danced”.
And on March 14, 1938, Hitler, who dreamed of his Third Reich lasting forever, exultantly did exactly that, already planning to exterminate the Jews who had produced a genius such as Freud. Undeterred too by Freud’s recognition of him as half clown, half monster.
Freud was delighted to escape to England, the more so as he had spent happy days in Manchester earlier in his life, and because of the warmth of the overwhelming reception he received. His library and his paintings and beloved collection of antiquities followed him from Austria, along with his famous couch.
Almost coincidentally with Hitler’s return to Vienna, Freud arrived at Victoria Station on June 6, 1938, to be greeted by a crowd of well-wishers amid the panic of a looming world war. Freud and family even took in the sights, Buckingham Palace included, before arriving at No 39 Elsworthy Road, Hampstead, which his son Ernst had rented for them for just three months.
Freud described it as “a charming little house,” and, after years confined indoors at Berggasse 19, in Vienna, he enjoyed his own room which looked out on to a verandah and the garden beyond. Yet soon it became the venue for illustrious visitors, among them Salvador Dali and the Royal Society’s three secretaries, who arrived clutching its precious Charter Book for him to sign his name, beneath that of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
On September 27, Freud and family moved to No 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, an eight-bedroom mansion now a permanent memorial museum adored by countless overseas visitors, which cost £6,500. Freud, who described it as “Far too beautiful for us”, was forced to take a bank loan of £4,000 to pay for it.
Freud’s final days there are drowned in an awful darkness as he still saw patients politely entertained to tea Virginia Woolf and publisher husband Leonard, their conversation a classic that has been safely stored.
Freud faced the misery of operations on his diseased jaw, the smell of cancer and gangrene as his face collapsed, sending his adored pet Chow, named Lun, now out of quarantine, reeling.
He was given shots of morphine to end his suffering – illegal then, as now – and he died on September 23, 1939. “Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense anyway,” were his dying words.
Freud died without religious and metaphysical consolation, as do the great majority of people, Edmundson reflects in what is a brilliant book. He believed solely in the future promise that ignorant human beings needed to know more about themselves to live a better life.
Alas, there is little sign of that in a world that has itself gone mad and is in need of a moral straitjacket – or its own permanent couch on which to confess its mortal sins. |
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