Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk

(Hardback)

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Matthew von Unwerth explores Sigmund Freud's provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing. Taking as his starting point the essay On Transience, Von Unwerth, examines the origins of human creativity from a psychoanalytic standpoint, tracing the arc of Freud's beliefs on the subject from his passionately curious teenage years to his death after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources - from the Odyssey to Goethe to Freud's earliest letters - Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and an absorbing intellectual debate.

Reviews

'This beautifully written and brilliantly conceived book is a gem. The way von Unwerth weaves back and forth between Freud and Rilke illustrates the literary heights to which great criticism rises. It also reads like a detective novel and the reader is kept in expectant suspension right to the very end.' Christopher Bollas

Author Bio

Matthew von Unwerth is director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, and coordinator of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination. He is a candidate in psychoanalytic training in New York City.