"I will obey you”, Hitler was said to have declared at a first meeting
with his psychoanalyst, Dr Karl Krueger. Krueger’s Inside Hitler, published
in New York in 1941, chronicled the failure of the therapy that ensued and
the practitioner’s own growing infatuation with his monstrous patient.
Inside Hitler is treated as a special item at the British Library, requiring
that the reader sit at a designated desk under the eye of an attendant in
Rare Books. This is presumably on the grounds that the work offers copious
evidence of the perversions. Obscene and punitive fantasies set the context
for a particularly florid dream, featuring Hitler’s dead and probably
murdered niece, Geli, who reappears, decapitated, to haunt her tormentor, in
a pool of blood. Hitler says: “Sometimes I see a mammoth shark opening its
jaws to devour me, and howling with terror I swim into the darkness”. The
entire account was, of course, a hoax. The “psychobiographer”, Robert G.
Waite, complained that it was a joke in very bad taste, in an appendix to
his own rather weightier account of Hitler’s mind, The Psychopathic God. But
it was apparently a convincing enough prank at the time to have induced the
novelist Upton Sinclair to provide the preface.
In The Death of Sigmund Freud, Mark Edmundson works with a less outlandish set
of conceits than Krueger’s, but he is also interested in speculating on the
meeting, or at least sighting, that could in theory have occurred between
the Führer and the psychoanalyst, in the public spaces of Vienna. Freud, he
muses, might well have pitied and despised the idle painter and “street
rat”, had he chanced upon him circa 1909. Although this book focuses on the
antinomies of psychoanalysis and Fascism, it also seeks to present,
especially after the Anschluss, what Edmundson calls the “oddly converging
lives” of the leaders of these two movements of thought. Sometimes the
“convergence” is strained, with the author virtually implying (albeit to
good dramatic effect), for instance, that a personal reckoning with the
founder of psychoanalysis was on Hitler’s mind as he raised the diplomatic
stakes in 1938: on March 14, writes Edmundson, Hitler was “heading to Vienna
(and to Freud)”.
The more serious and sustained concern of The Death of Sigmund Freud lies
elsewhere than in personal crossed paths, and rather in the dire psychic and
political processes that Nazism exploited and Freud might help us to think
about. A call to obedience and total faith in authority – that of the Führer
himself – were central to Nazism. This was also the terrain that Freud
opened up in his account of the superego, which he set out in The Ego and
the Id in 1923, and which was substantially to transform the discourse of
psychoanalysis thereafter. In certain circumstances, a particular type of
superego, for instance, cruel, mad and implacable, may seem to be given
licence to dominate the entire psyche. Freud’s work, Edmundson passionately
argues, has a very strong bearing on politics, including, but not confined
to, the specific politics that bedevilled interwar Europe, even if it says
little about the contingent historical factors that led to the disasters of
modern German history. In line with several earlier commentators, including
famously Philip Rieff, Edmundson thus presents Freud as a complex modern
moralist as well as a fascinating writer, not the least of whose
contributions was to suggest that the psychic propensity to “fascist” states
of mind may be interminable. Much of Edmundson’s discussion is hedged with
appropriate caveats about the necessary difference between free-floating
speculation and firm historical assertion. It subtly acknowledges obscurity
and the limitations of what we can know for certain about the inner lives of
the dead, but then, in a surprising shift of gear into “wild analysis”,
claims sure knowledge about what went on behind the Freuds’ closed bedroom
doors, stating matter-of-factly that the Freuds’ sexual relationship stopped
after the birth of their last child. The claim is based on Freud’s own
intimations, of course, but even so might have required a little more
circumspection.
To suggest, as Edmundson does, that the Eurocentric Freud viewed the United
States as a social catastrophe nearly as dire as the one embodied by the
Nazis, seems to me to be stretching it, even if Freud’s anti-Americanism was
indeed on occasion extreme and unfair. The contention that his
“anti-American obsession with wealth” is “uncomfortably close” to an
“anti-Semite grousing about Jewish money-hunger” is also uncomfortably
overblown. The bald claim that Hitler served with “stunning bravery” in the
First World War (a view based, apparently, on his Iron Cross) is also
unmeasured. Because Freud’s thought is not related here to very many
alternative insights into Fascist tyranny, nor to the wealth of
psychoanalytic work that came alongside and after Freud, there is a risk of
placing the great man on an unrealistically isolated pedestal and also of
shifting the discussion from Freud’s penetrating insight to a vision of his
near-complete prescience. Edmundson is aware of this risk, yet still moves
in this direction. He states, unequivocally, for instance, that “anyone who
had been reading Freud . . . would not have been terribly surprised at the
events of March 1938”. This is because “ever attentive to the sadistic side
of humanity, Freud believed that even the most apparently civilized people
nurse fantasies of violence, rape, and plunder”. But in many ways, despite
all that, what occurred in this period of history was unforeseen, even by
the very remarkable inventor of psychoanalysis.
Freud occasionally implied that he had seen clearly into a crystal ball, via
the discoveries of the consulting room. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé,
during the First World War, he had once claimed to have found nothing much
to surprise him in the carnage of the trenches. In fact, on other occasions,
Freud ruefully acknowledged something more like the reverse. It would be a
travesty of psychoanalysis, with its stress on what is irreducibly
individual, and also surprising in each of us (as well as what is shared,
structured and repetitive), to cast it as a kind of predictive behavioural
science. There is a tension here, no doubt, within Freud and within
psychoanalysis, but Edmundson seems to lose sight of that. He takes a
further interpretative liberty when he suggests strongly, and with no
supporting evidence at all, that Freud savoured the realization of his
bleakest expectations about the direction of political events in the 1930s:
“he must have taken some dark, quiet satisfaction in having anticipated the
horrible events at hand so well”.
Edmundson’s story moves, with Freud, from Vienna to London, and provides an
interesting commentary on his last major work, Moses and Monotheism. Moses
was a hero to whom Freud could aspire, precisely because he refused to
embody fundamentalist certainty. In an age when Fascism had elevated the
leader to a position of insane phallic potency, Moses, in Freud’s account,
was not only faced by terrible conflict, but was also impressively able to
resist the temptation blindly to enact the position of absolute master that
was open to him. He was, in short, a patriarch who called himself into
question.
The Death of Sigmund Freud tells the tale of Freud’s last personal sufferings
against the backdrop of worsening political crisis and of imminent war. It
movingly describes the quiet dignity that Freud managed to retain, in exile,
with help from his family and physician, in the face of a remorseless
cancer. Edmundson is unsparing in his description of the pain and even the
uncontrollable bad odour, as Freud’s demise came closer. Final preparations
and a personal sense of an ending are touchingly described and Freud’s
stoicism and courage well brought out, but again the narrative slides
towards idealization and a picture of an immaculately self-studied
departure. As much as any Socrates, it seems from this description, Freud
beautifully crafted his end into an ethical act. “Socrates, Cicero, and
Montaigne all had said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Freud’s
death would inevitably be a commentary on the philosophy of life that
psychoanalysis offered.” Freud’s passing is offered here as a perfect object
lesson in what came to be called by his follower Melanie Klein, “the
depressive position”.
Mark Edmundson
THE DEATH OF SIGMUND FREUD
Fascism, psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism
282pp. Bloomsbury. £18.99.
978 0 74758607 4
Daniel Pick is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.
His books include Rome or Death: The obsessions of General Garibaldi, 2005.
