The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days

From Publishers Weekly

Expanding on his 2006 New York Times Magazine article, Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge, Edmundson develops his thesis about the lure of powerful, authoritarian leaders. He begins in 1938 Vienna on the eve of Hitler's invasion and ends less than two years later, when Freud died in London. The crux of the book comes at its very end, where Edmundson, a contributing editor at Harper's, discusses Moses and Monotheism (published in 1939), arguing for Freud's profound insights into the rise of a totalitarian, paternalistic leader like Hitler. In fact, Edmundson's aim seems even grander: to revive Freud's legacy as a sage of human nature in an intellectual climate that has moved beyond many of his ideas. But the earlier parts of the volume are thin. Edmundson adds nothing in recounting the details of Freud's life, and those facts are repeated over and over. There are some moments of sharp insight when Edmundson veers away from the biographical and delves into his own critical ideas, but these would have been better served in an article rather than incorporated into a narrative of danger, escape, illness and death. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Freud's last book—Moses and Monotheism—has counted for little with critics, inclined to dismiss it as a product of his dotage. Edmundson, however, makes large claims for the psychologist's final work. Indeed, he interprets it as central to the dying revolutionary's bold strategy for endowing his psychoanalytic movement—deeply subversive of religion and patriarchal authority—with a quasi-religious permanence that ensured his own immortality as modernity's prophetic father. Despite his antipathy to religious faith, Freud devoted his last two years to a text reappropriating his own Jewish tradition as the wellspring of higher intellectual achievements. In rejecting the social solidity of pagan spectacles, the Hebrews—in Freud's theory—opened the door to honest exploration of the elusive individual psyche. Edmundson underscores the historical significance of Freud's paradigm by identifying its antithesis in Hitler's stunningly effective use of neopagan pageantry to incite a mass hysteria that made Vienna so politically hostile that the aging therapist had to flee. An insightful gloss on a generally neglected episode of Freud's life. Christensen, Bryce