Recent reading

The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days by Mark Edmundson


Fascinating book, parallel narratives of Freud's end of life and escape from Vienna (he was Jewish) and Hitler's rise.

He would, in a certain sense, soon start to think in depth about the man that the young Adolf Hitler, his fellow resident of Vienna in 1909, would become, and also about all the tyrants who have followed Hitler through the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first.

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 Not only did America always teeter close to mob rule; it was doomed to mediocrity because the lowest common denominator would always prevail. In America, there was no room for true leaders. The crowd, mesmerized by democratic propaganda, believed that it was always in the right. The people never needed to change or develop their vision of life. “My suspicion of America,” Freud said, “is unconquerable.”

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 On May 10, 1933, young Nazis had broken into the main libraries of Germany and hauled out the works that Goebbels detested most. They brought the books out by carloads and set them on fire, chanting “Brenne Karl Marx! Brenne Sigmund Freud!” They burned Heine and Remarque, Mann, Zweig, and Gide. “This is a strong, great and symbolic act,” Goebbels declared. “Never, as today, have young men had the right to cry out; studies are thriving, spirits awakening, oh, century, it is a joy to live!”

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 In his later period, Sigmund Freud predicted two shocking phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first was the rise of tyranny. ... Freud’s work also predicts the new birth of the fundamentalist urge.