"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.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now