Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer's Walk. By Matthew von Unwerth. New York:  Riverhead, 2005,  244 pp., $23.95.

Freud was a late representative of the Enlightenment in his devotion to the scientific study of human life and mind—in his secularism, his classicism, and his humanism. From another angle, the debt of psychoanalysis to romanticism is also visible, with its emphasis on the expression of the emotions, and on the hidden depths of motivation. Perhaps we can best locate its cultural background in a convergence of the two. Matthew von Unwerth's graciously written book, Freud's Requiem, is as good a guide to this juncture as one could ask for.

Taking as its point of departure Freud's short essay of the year 1915, “On Transience” (which, happily, is reprinted in the volume), and returning to it as a repeated point of reference in many contexts, von Unwerth gives us a mini-biography of each of the three people memorialized in the famous “summer walk in a smiling countryside” with which the essay begins: Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Lou Andreas-Salomé. The latter two are presented anonymously in the essay, and von Unwerth sympathizes with the opinion that it is a fiction based on less idyllic meetings, but no matter: all three are shown true to life.

In Freud's brief narrative of the walk, the poet Rilke laments the passage of all that is beautiful in nature and art. While Lou Andreas-Salomé, the lover of Rilke at an earlier period of his life, stays silent, Freud protests, to the contrary, that it is transience that underlies the allure of the world of life and nature and art. The flowering summer, so soon to depart, the works of art, that will ultimately disappear, life itself in its brevity, these engage our affections on that very account—that we cannot hold on to them. It is failing to accept loss that deprives the poet of appreciation of the present beauty. What in the lives of these three very different persons has brought about both their meeting and the many threads of experience woven into the “take” of each on these questions about ultimate meaning?

Von Unwerth repl