The Last Days of a Secular Priest

The story of Freud’s final years—how he was persuaded to flee just in time from Vienna to London, where he enjoyed a respectful, even affectionate, reception; his struggle to finish his final book, Moses and Monotheism; his painful death from cancer of the jaw—would have made an absorbing magazine article. This book gives us that story, but its author has more ambitious aims. There is certainly a place for popularizers, but in these days of higher illiteracy it is a daunting challenge to decide who needs to know what. In this case would anyone likely to be interested in Freud’s last days need to have explained the allegorical figures of the Id (renamed “the It”), Ego, and Superego? Would a reader drawn by the promise of a consideration of Freud’s legacy be unlikely to know that Neville Chamberlain was the British prime minister in 1938? That Vienna is in Austria? The author is unsure of his readership.

The account in the first half of this book—“Vienna”—is organized by a narrative device of questionable efficacy bolstered by labored explanations intended to fill out the story. Mark Edmundson deploys Adolf Hitler as the “antagonist” of Sigmund Freud. The first sentence cues us: “In the late autumn of 1909, two men who would each transform the world were living in Vienna, Austria.” This astounding coincidence then generates introductions to subsequent sections. (“While Freud was surrendering his practice and at least some of his dear cigars, Adolf Hitler was thriving.”) Some of these juxtapositions are merely ridiculous, but others are offensive, especially when they are substituted for historical perspective. (“Four days after Freud’s operation, Adolf Hitler delivered a fierce denunciation of the Czechs at a party rally in Nuremberg.”) The use of coincidence without analogy is tolerable in television documentaries; but, in a book that invites serious attention, it is a silly distraction.

Despite the Guggenheim sponsorship, this is not a scholarly book; but, since it asks to be read as something weightier than a Sunday supplement feature, holding it to a higher standard is fair. It is notable that there are frequent solecisms (“he was well begun in his explorations,” “partially complete,” “died at 97 years old”) as well as egregious faults in presentation. A point is called to mind that was made explicit only a few pages earlier; Freud’s jokes are explained; and the author’s witty observations are repeated, sometimes more than once. There are other equally annoying mannerisms. On occasion the author steps forward not just as explicator; speaking not just for Freud but as Freud, he lets the reader in on what Freud would have thought and sometimes he gives us what Freud would have said. Again the model seems to be the TV documentary: a famous pose in a photograph with the voice-over intoning an appropriate text or a faux text. Edmundson can also speak in the voice of Anna Freud: when the Nazis, having paid a visit to 19 Berggasse, have taken her to Gestapo headquarters for questioning about her father—Is he subversive?—her response is ready: “My father, she might have said, has always involved himself in science. He has labored for years in conditions as close to laboratory conditions as he can find in order to draw valid conclusions” and so on for a page and a half. Some readers, I suppose, would find this fanciful projection of her defense, in a “language of exculpation . . . both radically misleading and absolutely true,” a successful bit of dramatization; in my view it cheapens Edmundson’s credible insight into Anna Freud’s appreciation of her father’s aims and achievements. Here, as elsewhere, this book demonstrates the infelicitous effects of the fashionable substitution of narrative for exposition.

The second half of the book—“London”—is more successful, even though Hitler is not always left behind in Vienna, Austria, or Berlin, Germany. The story follows a simple chronology with three major motifs: the painful...