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There are several reasons why it would be difficult to find a book that deserves a review in American Imago more than Matthew von Unwerth's. Not only is the book about Freud, but it is largely devoted to his complex attitudes toward art and artists. In the main supporting role, von Unwerth has cast Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the first writers to express ambivalence toward psychoanalytic treatment and, in the eight decades since his death, the subject of numerous psychoanalytic studies. A shadowy backdrop is provided by Lou Andreas-Salomé, who introduced Rilke to Freud's works and then to him personally, and became a channel of communication between the two men after their second and final meeting at Berggasse 19 in 1915.
Matthew von Unwerth, director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, proves himself an excellent disciple of the aforementioned trio. In the best tradition of Freud's writing, which he has studied in the German original, he exemplifies how psychoanalysis is not only a scientific but also an artistic discipline both by his subject matter and by his style. Were it not for a few unnecessary repetitions, von Unwerth could be hailed as a virtuoso already for his first book.
The book's ostensible topic is Freud's paper “On Transience,” written in 1915 for a collection of essays devoted to Goethe and reproduced as an appendix to Freud's Requiem. However, although interesting in itself, this lyrical essay of approximately 1,000 words, an announcement of Freud's later works that study the topic of mourning more thoroughly, serves von Unwerth mostly as an excuse to weave a Borges-like story about everything that might have preceded and followed the writing of the essay, as well as a small number of events that really did take place. Above all, the book is devoted to elucidating Freud's strong interest in, and almost equally powerful ambivalence toward, the world of arts: Goethe, Shakespeare, music, Michelangelo, su