The Death of Sigmund Freud by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2007-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Freud had on his desk at 39 Elsworthy Road the third chapter of his Moses book, the chapter that would be by far the most incendiary. When it was completed—if it was—and bound together with the first two chapters, the book would create, if not a firestorm (there was too much happening on the larger stage of the world for that), then at the very least real controversy and surely some antipathy too. When Freud had been working on the book in Vienna, he understood that its publication would cause him problems: it was, he wrote, “bound to be something fundamentally new and shattering to the uninitiated. Concern for these uninitiated compels me to keep the completed essay secret.”

Even in England the Moses book would more than likely bring an end to the acceptance and affection that Freud was enjoying. (Perhaps the only time in his life when he had encountered a comparable feeling of acceptance was in 1909, when he came to America and experienced what he called the “incredible daydream.” But Freud had only contempt for the United States; for England, the country that now welcomed him, he felt something like adulation: in this love affair the affection flowed both ways.) Freud, sick as he was, old as he was, a refugee, with all the vulnerabilities of the newcomer in an adopted country, had to decide if he would dare to go forward. “I don’t anticipate a friendly reception from the scientific critics,” Freud said. “Jewry will be very offended.” The two chapters of the Moses book that Freud had already published were in German and in a rather obscure journal, Imago. Yet there were already people who had read them and had their worried intimations about the third. Soon they began to bring pressure on Freud.

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