Before Sigmund Freud left Austria in 1938, he was required to sign a document asserting that he had been treated by the authorities, especially the Gestapo, “with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom”. He signed, adding, “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.” The sarcasm was, fortunately, lost on the assembled thugs.

This meeting of one of the most brilliant men of our age and a few 20th-century goons is unusual because, generally, the goons win and the aberrant intellectual is simply silenced with a bullet, piano wire or a head-crushing boot. But, then, Freud is nothing if not unusual.

Freud (1856-1939) created the discipline of psychoanalysis. This was a subject, Mark Edmundson observes, on which there was no literature. He therefore, also invented a bibliography. It consisted, roughly, of everything ever written. In reading, Freud attempted to consume all of world history as if he would be satisfied with nothing less than a psychoanalysis of the entire planet.

What he was seeking, of course, was universality. Psychoanalysis is the attempt to unearth the deep psychic structures of humanity. These had to be independent of time or place. Paleolithic boys would have endured repression and the Oedipus complex as surely as any contemporary tyke. He sought universality because that was the goal of the scientific enlightenment; he sought laws of the psyche as solid as those of physics. And he became very angry indeed if anybody questioned the hard scientific nature of his work.

Now everybody questions this, and few are left to defend Freud’s work as science in any meaningful sense. In part, this is because psychoanalysis has been found to be considerably less effective than rival therapies – notably drugs and cognitive therapy. But it isalso because Freud’spsychodrama, the war between the id, the ego and the super-ego, is seen more as a resonant metaphor than as an actual description of the human mind. Vladimir Nabokov dismissed it all as the application of Greek myths to the genitals, which is harsh but true. Freud painted a portrait of the unseen, but many other portraits are possible.

In spite of this, we are stuck with his irrefutable greatness. But of what, if not scientific achievement, does it consist? Mark Edmundson’s answer is, essentially, moral and political. The encounter with the Gestapo is important because Freud saw tyranny not as some passing aberration, but as an entirely predictable product of the human psyche, of the need, in essence, to seek consolation and escape from one’s own predicament by placing one’s destiny in the hands of the dictator/ father. The crowds that cheered the German armour as it rolled into Austria were experiencing a mighty sublimation.

Resisting this requires self-awareness, which thus becomes the supreme virtue. Edmundson’s conclusion is a celebration of the possibility, anticipated but also defined by Freud, of the truly self-aware person “continually in the process of deconstructing various god replacements and returning once again to a more sceptical and ironic middle ground”. Such people cannot fall for tyranny or, in our time, fundamentalism.

At one level, this is dubious because it seems to replay a familiar religious myth of transfiguration and because it makes the enormous assumption, repeatedly disproved by history, that humanity is capable of transcending its animal nature. But I don’t think Edmundson is speaking of some Utopian project; rather, he is defining, in the light of Freud’s thought, the righteous or ethical man – not a man who believes nothing, but a man whose beliefs are constantly subject to criticism and revision.

This saves Freud’s greatness. He emerges, in one sense, as the great opponent of the slaughterhouse of the 20th century, a modernist akin to Picasso at the moment he painted Guernica. But, in another, broader sense, Edmundson portrays him as a great prophet and moralist, a man with a specific vision of the human predicament, from which he derived a clear ethical posture.

Edmundson uses Freud’s death as the focus of this interpretation. It happened in London, in September 1939, just 20 days after the start of the second world war. An incurable tobacco addict, Freud had suffered for years from a cancer eating away at his face. The pain he endured never seemed to diminish his appetite for work, whether it involved seeing patients or writing, always writing.

Freud arrived at this death having left Nazi Austria. Edmundson shows us what a close call it was. As a leading figure in what the Nazis called “Jewish science”, Freud was at the top of their hit-list. But, thanks to American and British pressure and to one Anton Sauerwald, he escaped. Sauerwald was a party hack who, fortuitously, read some of Freud’s seized books and, somehow, glimpsed the man’s greatness. At the critical moment, he concealed information that would have incriminated Freud and instead signed off his departure. Later, astoundingly, he visited Freud in London, although we do not know what was discussed.Sauerwald’s kindness and the intervention of Freud’s family earned him leniency when he was tried after the war.

Freud’s death is central to this book because it was, in Edmundson’s terms, the death of a prophet, an exemplary death like that of Socrates. The combination of Freud’s courage in the face of his pain and his insistence to the end on the universal validity of his vision of the ethical man represents one of the great, prophetic images of our time. In the end, Edmundson’s Freud saw himself as Moses, the supreme Jewish leader, intellectual and lawgiver, and the hero of Moses and Monotheism, one of his last and most controversial books. His death was that of a patriarch. But it was that of a patriarch whose life had consisted of a long warning of the perils of patriarchy, of tyranny and fundamentalism, of our wounded psyches. Such is the paradox of this amazing man.

This book, readable and thrilling, should, I need hardly add, be read.

THE DEATH OF SIGMUND FREUD: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism by Mark Edmundson
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp288
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

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