Biography:Sigmund Freud's ashes rest in a columbarium in London, but Freudianism goes marching on.
Though his ideas have been abandoned by some doctors and academics, and psychiatrists are ridiculed (unless needed), Freud's concept that the human mind is divided against itself - id, ego and superego, primitive impulses, conscious awareness and repressive conscience, Eros and Thanatos, life force versus death wish - is generally taken for granted, if only subliminally, by that great majority who have never read any of his works. The term Freudian slip is often used in conversation by those with only a vague idea of what it means. Even so, Freud's psychological theories, willy-nilly, are part of our inherited culture.
Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, makes the meaning of that heritage perfectly clear. In this excellent book about the last two years of Freud's life, 1938 and 1939, Edmundson demonstrates the durability of Freud's notion of "the human hunger for power and the human desire to be dominated".
Freud wrote that the typical Oedipal male repudiates domination by his father; and yet, paradoxically, a nation at a time of anxiety longs for submission to a strong father figure. The people of a democracy find irresponsibility such a relief. Though Freud was himself an authoritative patriarch, he deplored submission to patriarchy on a national scale. Edmundson shows that Freud's opinions on this subject still apply with discomforting relevance to the growing influence of religious and political fundamentalism in international relationships today.
Freud was born in 1846. At the University of Vienna, he qualified as a doctor of medicine, specialising in neurology, then switched to psychology and developed his own system of diagnosing psychiatric disorders by analysing patients' dreams and earliest memories. At the beginning of his long career, Freud was concerned particularly with what Edmundson calls "the dynamics of desire". Later, Freud became "more and more preoccupied with the issue of authority", especially "authority gone bad", and how humans respond to tyrants, "not just obey them, but honour and love them".
Freud published numerous seminal books on the psyche. One of them was on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, which is rather heavy going but reveals a certain dry wit. He gained an international reputation. On his 80th birthday there were congratulations from Einstein, Thomas Mann, HG Wells, Romain Rolland, Albert Schweitzer and many others.
In 1938, at the age of 82, Freud was in excruciating pain, even before Anschluss and the arrival of the Germans. For many years he had smoked 20 cigars a day, suffered 30 operations to remove cancerous parts of his jaw and palate - and continued to smoke. Austria was already infested with its own Nazis and anti-Semitism. Hitler's annexation was enthusiastically welcomed. Home-grown storm-troopers burned synagogues, looted and destroyed Jewish property and humiliated Jews by forcing them to perform menial tasks, such as scrubbing pavements with toothbrushes and cleaning latrines with their bare hands.
Soon, of course, there were also beatings and murders and banishment to concentration camps. As he was one of Vienna's 175,000 Jews, Freud feared for his family's safety. At first, however, he refused to leave the country.
WHEN, AT LAST, he agreed to go, leaving was not easy. President Roosevelt and US diplomats in Paris and Berlin brought their influence to bear on his behalf, in spite of Freud's criticism of the American way of life. Edmundson writes, admirably withholding indignant comment: "Everyone in America, Freud believed, was dully materialistic, without cultivation, without subtlety, without the capacity to enjoy life's higher pleasures . . . They're all afflicted with a hideous disease: 'dollaria'."
Anyway, friendly exertions prevailed. Freud's good friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon, helped with money, when the Nazis took away much of his as a "refugee tax". Before he was allowed to get his family aboard a train, the Gestapo required him to sign a statement that he had been treated by the German authorities "with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation".
He added a sentence which proves he really did understand jokes: "I can highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."
As an Anglophile, Freud was glad to reach London in 1939, where the press warmly acclaimed him. Letters could be delivered addressed only to "Sigmund Freud, London". His family settled in a house with a pleasant garden in Hampstead. But the pain of cancer was so terrible that he persuaded his doctor to kill him with overdoses of morphine. Shortly before his death, Freud was able to finish his long-considered book Moses and Monotheism, suggesting that Moses was probably Egyptian and excoriating the imaginary being Freud called "the sky-god". Freud was an intellectual provocateur right to the end.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer
The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism By Mark Edmundson Bloomsbury, 276pp. £18.99